


Wunderkind-Season 3

by JustAnotherWriter (N1ghtshade)



Series: Wunderkind [3]
Category: MacGyver (TV 2016)
Genre: Angst, Found Family, Gen, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Non-Graphic Rape/Non-Con, Past Rape/Non-con, Team as Family, Vigilante AU, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-04
Updated: 2020-06-12
Packaged: 2020-12-01 20:36:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 23
Words: 429,824
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20891921
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/N1ghtshade/pseuds/JustAnotherWriter
Summary: Everything is about to change...The Phoenix team is fragmented. Mac is missing, Jack and the team are searching desperately, and every day, it seems less and less likely that they'll succeed, and that they may have to accept the worst. But somewhere out there, struggling to find a way to outwit his most dangerous enemy of all, all Mac wants is to come home...





	1. Improvise

**Author's Note:**

> I never thought I'd get this far when I started this AU, but now I can't imagine anything different! Thank you to everyone who's read, commented, and/or screamed threats of bloody murder at me for this AU, I couldn't have done it without you...

### 301-Improvise

VISTA HOTEL

SOMEWHERE IN COLORADO

Jack's barely drifted into an unsettled doze when the phone rings. He's instantly alert, grabbing for the cell phone desperately, struggling to get his bearings in the crappy hotel room. His injured shoulder twitches, but he ignores it, just like he ignored the insistence of Dr. Grey that he should be doing PT for it. _ It was just a vest impact. So what if it was my bad arm? _ He can’t waste time in PT when Mac is missing. 

The number isn't Riley, or Matty, or anyone else in his contacts. But he answers anyway, if only so he can vent his rage on some automated messaging system.

"J-j-jack?" The voice is soft, broken, and teary, but Jack would know it anywhere.

"Oh my God, Mac, where are you?"

"Shh, please." Mac sounds like he's on the verge of breaking down sobbing. "Jack, I messed up. I messed up." His words are wobbly and he's mumbling, repeating himself. He sounds like he's one of three things, drunk, high, or delirious. Jack doesn't know which one of those is worse. "Please help me."

"I'm gonna come get you, kid, just tell me where you are." Jack's pulling his tac vest on over the worn AC/DC shirt he slept in. It doesn't matter if the kid's on the other side of the country or the other side of the world. Jack is coming for him _ right now _. He pulls the phone away long enough to text Riley and ask for a trace. She sleeps as poorly as Jack does right now, she'll be sure and get it. But he can't force himself to wait for her. And what if Mac hangs up?

"I don't know where I am," Mac whispers. "I don't remember much. The last few days..." His voice wobbles and breaks. "I don't know what he did to me." The words send an icy spear down Jack's spine. 

"Buddy, I'm gonna come get you. I'm on my way..." There's a thud of footsteps, a panicked cry, and a sound like a solid object connecting with a human body. "Mac? Mac!"

The only response is a soft whistle of an all too familiar tune. _ Home on the Range _. Jack's whole body goes stiff and icy cold.

"Well, hello, Jack." The psychopath's voice pushes Jack over the edge. 

"What have you done to him, you heartless bastard?"

"Now, now, now, Jack, don't get so upset. I'm keeping dear, precious Angus safe."

"Safe." Jack laughs humorlessly. "Is that why he's calling me?"

"Oh, that was just a minor lapse of judgment. You see, apparently I still haven't quite worked out the right dosage, and he woke up a bit sooner than I expected."

“When I find you, I’m going to kill you slowly. I swear to God, Murdoc…”

"You ought to be grateful. When I found MacGyver he was injured, sick, running scared from everyone. Sleeping in an alley. I offered him my protection, and he accepted. He understood the terms of my deal perfectly."

"You monster."

"Oh, no, Jack, you have no idea what monsters I've saved him from. I promise, I'm the best deal in town. I want to keep precious little Angus all to myself; I won't be auctioning him to the highest bidder to line my own pockets. Not like some of my associates." The purr in Murdoc's voice is sickening. "He's lucky I found him first."

There’s a weak, soft whimper from the floor. Jack shivers, wondering what state the kid is in. Whether he’s even trying to push himself to his feet, or if he’s too weak. _ Mac, what has he done to you? _

"Oh Angus, you didn't think I was going to forget that you'd broken the rules? Because as much fun as conversations with Papa Dalton are, you know you're not allowed to call him." There's a cracking thud, and a whimpered yelp that rips out Jack's heart.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry!" Mac pleads, and the desperation in his voice sends tears rolling down Jack's cheeks. "I'm sorry!"

“This time, I’ll make sure it’s only you that pays. But Angus, if you won't stop trying to go back to them, I'm just going to have to make sure you can't. Call them again, and I'll hunt them down and kill every last one of them."

Jack hears a keening wail of desperate, helpless misery.

"I'm going to kill YOU!" He screams, even though it’s an empty threat. 

"Oh, I don't think so. Because I will see you coming, and by the time you find us, I will have put a bullet in Angus's oh-so-marvelous brain. It would be quite a shame, he really is so...unique. I would hate to deprive the world of someone so intelligent. But it will be your fault if I am forced to,” he says casually. “Now Angus, let's see about an appropriate punishment, shall we?" Jack can hear the smile in Murdoc's voice. And then the line goes dead.

Jack flings the phone down on the bed, turns his face into the pillow, and sobs. He hasn’t cried since the first day Mac vanished, he hasn’t let himself. He’d been hoping, somehow, for the best, even after the dog tags came. He’d hoped that maybe, just maybe, Mac asked someone to send them for him. _ It was nothing more than wishful thinking, but I wanted to believe he would be alright. _ Just like he always wanted to believe that the barn kittens who disappeared each year had been found by the road by kind families who would take them home and love them, when all along he knew the truth about the coyotes and hawks and speeding cars. _ I told myself Mac was safe because I didn’t know how else to force myself to keep going. _ But now even the comfort of lying to himself is gone. 

Jack's phone pings twice in quick succession. The first is Riley. The trace was cut off before she could pinpoint a location, but it appears Murdoc is somewhere in Canton, Ohio. 

The second text is from a number Jack's never seen before tonight. It's a picture. 

Jack doesn't want to open it. He doesn't want to give Murdoc the satisfaction of knowing that Jack is angry and helpless to do anything. Doesn't want to encourage that gleefully evil smile to get any bigger. 

But he can't help himself. He hasn’t seen Mac in three weeks. He just wants to know how badly the kid's hurt. What shape he's going to be in when, _ when, not if _, Jack finds him. So he opens it, and immediately regrets it as he grabs blindly for a trash can.

Mac's in a hotel room, not all that different from the one Jack's in. His normally blond hair looks like it's been dyed black, but it's hard to tell with the graininess of the photo and the darkness of the room. But some things are still too abundantly clear. Mac's wrists are tied together with thick rope and secured to the head of the bed. He's naked, and the picture's been taken at an angle that Jack is sure purposefully avoided any attempt at modesty. There’s some kind of collar around his neck. And on Mac's bare chest, over his heart, are four fresh, bleeding gashes that spell out one gruesome letter. M.

* * *

MAC’S HOUSE

FIVE WEEKS LATER

Patty groans, her stiff shoulder spasming, papers falling from her suddenly limp hand and to the wooden floor of Mac’s deck. She knows it shouldn’t be this bad, it’s the stress and lack of sleep that’s adding to the nerve damage from Murdoc’s shot. It seems like a lifetime ago, that confrontation in the junkyard. When she didn’t know how dangerous that psychotic killer was going to be. _ I think I liked him better when he just wanted to kill us all. _

The whole team is falling apart. Matty’s handwriting, on every report that comes across Patty’s desk, is shakier by the day. Jack has circles under his eyes the size of his home state when he calls in on the video screen each evening. Riley is retreating into herself, spending hours poring over every surveillance feed she can get her hands on, legally or illegally. Cage is burning bridges with every sketchy contact she’s ever had. And Bozer...Bozer is falling apart. Leanna’s worried sick about him; he’s been pulling all nighters, and none of them see him eat. 

She stands up and looks out at the city. It feels wrong, being here without Mac. But it felt even worse to sit in her office. She doesn’t know how much longer they can pretend that things are ever going to be okay again. _ It’s been two months since Mac disappeared. Two weeks since the last contact with Murdoc. _

Every once in a while, he sends some sort of taunting message, never enough to give them a clue to a current location, only enough to create helpless rage. Patty didn’t even tell Jack about the last one. She knows he’ll want to kill her for it, but the things Murdoc said were nothing but cruel jabs. She wants to shove every one of his notes, every one of the horrible pictures he’s sent, into the fire pit and light them up. But she can’t, because it’s the only scrap of evidence they have. 

Patty sits down on the bench. Mickey lays his head in her lap, whining. Even the dog looks depressed. He’s barely two years old, he should be a ball of energy. Instead, his toys are laying forgotten in random corners, and he only leaves his bed in the corner (apparently one of Mac’s old sweatshirts has been dragged in there at some point) to jump up quivering whenever the door opens. _ We’re all anxiety cases now. Even the therapy dog. _ Patty could laugh at the irony if she didn’t feel like crying. 

“I thought I might find you here.” Patty turns around at the voice from behind her. She never even heard anyone come in. But Cage is standing there.

“Please tell me you have good news.”

“Not exactly good, but it’s news.” Cage sits down beside her, staring out over the horizon. “It took a lot of...convincing, but one of my informants finally cracked. He told me word in the underground is that someone else kidnapped Murdoc’s son and he’s hell-bent on getting that kid back.”

“And how does Mac fit into all of this?” Patty asks. 

“I don’t know. Possibly, Murdoc wants his help. But...frankly, I think that while Murdoc would like that, what he wants even more is simply to own Mac. I think that’s what he’s always wanted.”

The sick thing is, Patty has to agree. Whatever other ends Murdoc has in mind, first and foremost he simply wants Mac because he’s always seen him as someone to be posessed. He clearly heard about what happened to Mac in prison, he taunted him with it more than once. And he just wanted to be the next person to use him._ It makes me sick, and furious, that after everything we promised Mac, after we tried to protect him, we failed. _ He’s back in the hands of someone cruel, someone who can do to him whatever they choose. _ It’s no better than prison and in some ways it might be worse. _

“It’s more than we had,” Sam says, her face tight. “And now that we know, I have a plan. You can tell me to drop it and I’ll never say another word. But, if we can find Cassian before Murdoc does…”

“We can bargain with him to return Mac.” Patty says. She’s had the same thought. _ Cage and I are pragmatists. We’ll do whatever it takes to get our jobs done. _ “I would rather it didn’t come to that. But I’ll leave it as an option on the table.” She knows that normally, the team would protest. But she’s heard that Matty already used Cassian as a bargaining chip. And she knows Jack would burn the world down to get Mac back. And they might be forced to choose the lesser of two evils. 

“Still means we have to find him first. So let’s do that.” 

* * *

ABANDONED HOUSE

SOMEWHERE IN THE UNITED STATES

Murdoc stops at the door to the root cellar and pulls out his key. It’s not that he really _ needs _ to take extra precautions. _ Angus has nowhere to run to. I remind him of that often enough. _ The head injury that left the boy with amnesia seems to still be slowly fading. He remembers Murdoc now, and clearly he remembers his little team. The ones he seemed to think were some sort of family. 

Still, he’s not the defiant person Murdoc remembers from their last encounters. Something of that strength that kept him for shattering in the face of Murdoc’s jabs and taunts has been lost, possibly irretrievably. _ He seems more innocent now than ever. _Murdoc hadn’t imagined that MacGyver could be any better than he was the other times Murdoc’s seen him. But this...makes him perfect. 

When he opens the door, Angus looks up fearfully. His eyes are sunken and shadowed, his hands trembling ceaselessly. His cheeks are caked with dried streaks of tears. 

Murdoc smiles. The boy is so pretty when he cries. And there’s been plenty of that these past few weeks. _ I thought it would get boring, after a while. That I’d get tired of him, like everyone else I’ve gotten my hands on. _ But so far, he’s found MacGyver endlessly fascinating. 

Murdoc’s never seen anyone so simultaneously strong and fragile. Beating and physically torturing the boy, he already knows, wrings at most some pained grunts and screams. But the true pleasure is tearing into his mind, watching Angus retreat into himself in abject terror, watching him sob as he gives in to the inevitable. _ Such a precious broken thing. _

He’s toyed with the idea of shattering the boy’s fingers, one by one, but those hands are too clever and skilled to damage just yet. Maybe if Angus does something to truly merit that punishment...because Murdoc itches to savor the anguish the boy would certainly feel at losing his most valuable tools. _ If I get tired of him, I’ll do it right before I throw him back to Dalton and his team. _

He couldn’t believe his good fortune when he stopped in San Francisco to get the latest news from Luis and was told Angus was in town. And the state he found the boy in was so delightfully pathetic. Ragged, filthy, sick and starving, reduced to pawing through trash like a stray dog. So alone and friendless and destitute. _ Absolutely beautiful. _

“Come along,” he says, grabbing the chain collar he’s fastened around the boy’s throat. _ He kept reaching for those dog tags, when he was scared, when he was close to panicking. _And then it would only get worse when he realized they were gone, that Murdoc had taken them, taken the one tie he had to his little ‘family’. 

_ And this, this is perfect. _ Murdoc’s collared and tagged the boy like a pet, and now when MacGyver panics and reaches for his throat, all he’ll find there is another reminder of what he really is. Murdoc can tell that there’s a certain reflexive comfort in having anything there to hold, but also that Angus hates the fact that that comfort comes from something that marks him as a possession. _ Oh, if only Jack could see this. That I’ve replaced his claim on his precious MacGyver with my own. _

Flinching away from the fingers at his neck, Angus stands up shakily. The tremors in his hands are spreading through his whole body. It’s been too long since his last dose. Murdoc was fairly sure that would happen, he knew this time he would be away longer. 

When he prepares the needle, he sees Angus shudder from more than the tremors of withdrawal. He holds up the needle, pressing it against Angus’s arm. Then he pulls it back.

"Wait, I think we’re forgetting something," He says, and it's an absolute pleasure to watch the boy's eyes fill with tears, half from desperation and half from shame. "Where are your manners, Angus? You know what you need to say if you want something."

“N-no.” there’s still enough pride and courage left in MacGyver that he’s stubborn. He may not be able to control his emotions, but he still fights for what little control he has of his life. 

“Very well, have it your way. You know the only difference is a few hours more to suffer. Why don’t you save yourself the trouble? All you have to do is say the word, and all this pain can be gone. I don’t _ want _ to hurt you, Angus. I just want you to learn.” He smiles. _ He hates both options, but he hates one more. _ Finding ways to make the boy choose between the lesser of two evils has been the most enjoyment Murdoc has had in quite some time. _ It’s a distraction, and a rewarding one at that. _

Murdoc’s got to smile a bit, it’s a clever manipulation if he does say so himself. Dose Angus with the drugs unwillingly for a while, and although he wasn’t as much fun when he didn’t know what he was doing, it was a means to an end. It didn’t take a terribly long time to create physical addiction, Murdoc’s special cocktail is perfect for that.

Murdoc knows the boy would rather put himself through the pain of withdrawal than keep taking the drug; he knows Angus loathes the dependence he feels now. But the truth is, he doesn’t have a choice. It’s the only escape Murdoc offers him from the misery, and he’s going to use the drug on Angus whether he wants it or not. The only choice he offers is how long Angus will have to wait.

He watches MacGyver tremble and shiver miserably for a little while longer, then presses the needle into his arm, watching as the liquid in it enters Angus’s blood. Angus was so far gone in the throes of withdrawal that he almost didn’t notice, but just as Murdoc finishes, he looks up at him with betrayed, sad eyes, and two tears trickle down his cheeks as he curls into a pitiful huddle on the floor. 

Most people think a broken toy is useless. Murdoc thinks that’s the best kind. 

He wonders what the team will think when they learn the truth. When they find out what Angus has been reduced to. A pathetic junkie desperate for the next fix. Whether he wants to be or not. 

MacGyver stirs on the floor, looking up at Murdoc with something almost like anger in his eyes. When the drugs first kick in, it always gives him a few moments of strength, and those were always the times he tried to escape, back when he first believed that would do any good. Pain dulled and fatigue temporarily pushed aside, he’d made a few attempts. But they always ended in failure. And now, Murdoc has him so convinced that there’s nowhere else to go, that he seems to have stopped trying. _ He’s learning. He craves acceptance and belonging, and sooner or later he’ll learn to find that from me. _

“When Jack finds you-” Angus whispers.

Murdoc cuts him off. “They wouldn’t want you back if I dropped you on their doorstep, Angus.” 

“You’re lying.” His voice is hoarse and cracked and shaking. “They’re coming for me. And they’re going to destroy you when they find you.” 

“Oh, stop fooling yourself. Who is going to want you now, except me? Even if your precious Jack did find you, he’d be disgusted. A strung out junkie who’s the plaything of someone they call a monster? Look at yourself.” He twists his fingers in the strap around Angus’s neck and pulls the boy up so he can see his face in the mirror, so MacGyver can see the blown-wide pupils and the unhealthy paleness under the heated blush for himself. “Pathetic. What use would Dalton or any of them have for you now? They’d throw you back to the streets. Back to me.”

“N-no.” Despite it all, he’s still fighting. 

“Stop telling yourself they care. Look what you’ve become. Who could possibly love you now? The only person in the world who wants you is me.” When the boy sobs loudly, brokenly, Murdoc smiles.

* * *

OVERSIGHT’S OFFICE

JACK HAS A FEELING HE WON’T LIKE THIS CONVERSATION

Jack cannot believe what he’s hearing. Not from Patty. _ How can she tell us that she’s pulling back from this search? How could she just let that maniac have Mac? _ If she orders him to give up, he’ll turn in his resignation and walk out the door right now. Nothing is more important than getting Mac back. Nothing. 

He leans on the desk, barely controlled anger radiating through his voice. “We’re not giving up on Mac. Patty, we can’t.”

Patty shakes her head. She looks like she’s aged years in the past two months. “I’m not giving up on him either, Jack. But if you want to keep looking for him with the resources of this agency, I need to make sure there’s an agency to support you.” 

Jack sighs, running his fingers through his sparse hair and pacing. _ Of course. She has more than just one problem to worry about. _ If it were anything else, he would have understood that already. But his desperation has made him blind. _ She’s trying to do the best she can to help get him back too. _

“I’m sorry, Patty.”

“No need to be. I understand. And believe me, there is nothing I want more than to be out there in the field hunting Murdoc down with you. But I know there’s no one more qualified than you.”

“It doesn’t feel like it.” Jack has nothing. Weeks of searching have given them nothing but dead ends. It’s like Murdoc and Mac have vanished off the face of the earth. Which is why he’s back in L.A. Hoping desperately that maybe coming back to where it started will do some good. “He hid for years. How are we ever going to track him down?” And they only caught him because Mac was with them. _ He took the only person who had ever beaten him, and made sure they never could again. _ He doesn’t want to think about how Murdoc might make sure of that. _ Once he’s had his...fun, what will he do to Mac? _

Patty sighs. Her face is drawn and pale, Jack is sure his own must look the same. “But all that time, he was alone. Having Mac makes him more vulnerable. And I don’t believe Mac has given up. It’s not in his nature. Someday, he’s going to find a way to escape, or to lead us to him.” Jack nods. He knows they have to keep believing that. It’s the only way to stay sane. 

Patty’s phone rings, and Jack takes that as his cue to leave. He wanders into the War Room, where it appears Riley is just back from PT. Her hair is wet, hanging loosely around her shoulders, and she’s still in a cropped sweatshirt and yoga pants. He can see the scars on her stomach, almost parallel to each other, from the shot she took a year ago and the one she took a few months ago.

These are the days he wishes kids like her, kids like Mac, didn’t get caught up in this life. That there had been some other recourse. Another job they could have that pardoned their crimes but didn’t threaten their lives. 

Riley looks up when he enters, and there’s something like hope on her face. Jack’s been hard pressed to see that in any of them lately. He’s starting to forget what it looks like. 

“Please. Riley, tell me you have something.” Jack feels like he’s going to shatter. 

“Not on Murdoc. But...I think I found his son.” Riley holds up her tablet. “Someone taking photos on a historic street in Cartagena, Columbia captured this.”

The photo at first looks like any other one taken by some tourist, some old buildings and colorful vendor stalls that will make them look cultured to all their friends on social media. But when Riley zooms in, in a window, there are three pieces of paper with colorful scribbles. 

Still, that could be the work of any small child left to themselves to amuse themselves while the parents work. But the scribbled figures, one tall with yellow hair and something red in their hand, and the other very short, with long purple strokes for hair, are very familiar. Matty had several drawings Cassian gave her while he was still in Phoenix custody, she kept them in her office. Jack is very familiar with how Cassian draws Mac and Matty. 

“I think we can trap him,” Riley says. “Remember his contact we worked with when...when Mac had to pretend to _ be _ Murdoc?” Jack would rather just forget, but he nods. They’ve already tracked him down in San Francisco and shaken the guy down for any information, but aside from a long winded story about three second cousins five times removed, a cotton candy machine, and some old guy with a house full of weird technical stuff, the man couldn’t give them a thing. He knows Murdoc only as “Kurt”, a black market dealer who looks him up whenever he comes into town. He has no idea how to contact Murdoc, and even less idea where he might have gone. 

“If I make sure these photos find their way to him, using my old logins from my black hat days, I might be able to make sure we put Murdoc right where we can find him. I know he’s been throwing out feelers on the dark web looking for children kidnapped and being moved around Central and South America.” 

“Do it.” Jack is sure the guy knows more than he was telling, that he has some way of reaching out and eventually getting Murdoc’s attention. “I’m going down there. Have our operatives in country put round the clock surveillance on the place, but keep it quiet.”

“It’s too late, they’re gone, I checked more recent views of the same place. I think whoever has Cassian realized he did this and moved them. But...Murdoc won’t know that.” 

* * *

MAC’S LOST TRACK OF TIME

IT DOESN’T REALLY MATTER ANYWAY

Mac huddles in the dark, as far away from the cellar door as he can get, and feels along the wall for the bolt. He found it a few weeks ago, it’s been set into the mortar above his head level, and he only realized it was there when Murdoc decided to chain his wrists to it. 

He chips at the mortar and brick around it with the once-sharp stone he keeps hidden in a corner, the edges so dull it barely makes a dent in the wall now. Really, it’s just something to keep his hands busy. He already knows there’s no way to open the cellar door from the inside, and the bolt would make a pretty pitiful weapon. _ And after all, what would I be running to, if I got away? _ Whoever finds him, when they realize who he is, they’ll turn him in for what he did to Jill. But if his hands are busy, he has less time to think. And thinking just hurts. 

He’s been alone for the past three days, which can only mean that when Murdoc returns, he’ll want Mac right away. He always does. And he doesn’t want to think about what’s going to happen then. 

It would have been better if Murdoc was cruel. But he’s not. Mac no longer feels aching bruises from someone’s grip all over his body. Now it’s lingering shudders at a feather-light touch that never seems to completely disappear. 

He knows how to react to pain. It fades, over time. It reminds him that he didn’t want what happened, that someone else took advantage of him. And as humiliating as that is, he’d prefer it to the sickening thought that Murdoc is able to make him find a kind of twisted pleasure in all of this. 

He hates his reaction to the combination of Murdoc’s uncharacteristic gentleness and whatever drug he’s using. _ It’s a biological instinct, _ the remaining shreds of his rational intelligence remind him. It’s not his fault. But he still feels broken and used in a worse way than ever before.

_ “I can make you enjoy it.” _ At first, he hadn’t believed Murdoc at all. But now...

Murdoc’s cruel, twisted games are too much. _ Why is he doing this to me? _ Mac doesn’t understand this. He understands the violent lust, the animal desire that he’s been the victim of far too many times, but this… It’s more cruel, in its own way. 

He’s not sure whether his determination is worth the pain. There have been quite a few nights when he’d contemplated taking that sharp stone to his wrists rather than the mortar. It would be over fast, and that way he wouldn’t give Murdoc what he wanted anymore. But the thought of what Murdoc would do afterward, the way he would taunt the team, the way he’d flaunt Mac’s absolute brokenness in front of them, keeps him fighting. 

_ And because I keep fighting, he keeps tormenting me. _ It would be so easy to give up, to give in... _ That’s it. _He wants to kick himself for not thinking of this sooner, but he hasn’t been able to think clearly in so long...

Jack calls a lot of Mac’s plans stupid. But he would definitely say this one is the dumbest of all. _ But I think it’s the only chance I have. _ He can’t run away while Murdoc is drugging him like this and keeping him locked up. And Murdoc won’t stop doing that until Mac stops fighting. _ He wants me to act like I belong to him, like I’ve accepted that he owns me. _

He tosses the stone shard away and shoves the crumbled mortar back around the bolt. It feels wrong to sit there in the dark with still hands, but he has to. He twists a thin, flat stone through his fingers, and clings to the one clear thought in his mind the way he clings to that stone. _ Jack can fix this. _ It’s the only reason he hasn’t given up yet. Because Jack is out there, somewhere, and no matter what Murdoc says, Jack is coming for him. But Mac might have to give him a little help. _ I know he’s out there looking. But I have to give him something to look for. _And he can’t do that unless he gets out of here.

He’s not sure how long he waits there in the dark. He falls asleep, or thinks he does, but there’s no way to tell for sure, surrounded by blackness, unless he dreams. And he wasn’t asleep enough for that. 

But he must have slept, or dozed, because a sound from somewhere close startles him awake. He can hear, up above him, the creak of door hinges and old floorboards. Murdoc is back. He shivers, he was hoping to have a little longer to prepare himself to face the monster. To do what he has to do and hope that he’s a better actor than Bozer used to give him credit for. He remembers now, he remembers _ them. _ But the only way to get back to them is the biggest risk he’s ever taken. Because if Murdoc finds out, Mac will _ wish _ he was dead. 

It takes everything in him not to threaten and curse when the man walks through the door. Murdoc is smiling, more eerily cheerful than Mac’s possibly ever seen. _ What does he have planned for me now? _

Murdoc’s fingers twist into the tight collar around his neck and drag Mac upright. He’s learned not to fight a grip on that chain, if he does, Murdoc will only make it tighter. He barely has time to get his balance before Murdoc pulls him stumbling up the stairs into the house itself. Mac blinks against the painful sunlight. He’s not sure if it’s the drugs or the old head injury that makes his head pound so terribly when he’s pulled from the darkness into daylight. It’s sickening, and he has to close his eyes and breathe deeply for a few minutes to let the wave of agony pass. 

Murdoc goes through the usual motions. The needle, the question. But this time, Mac doesn’t let himself be defiant. And as much as surrendering tears into his soul, leaves scars deeper than Murdoc’s knives ever have, he gives in for the first time.

It’s not like it changes anything, or at least that’s what he tells himself to try and distract from the pain and humiliation. Murdoc would have done this anyway, he always does when he comes back, and it’s just as painful and brutal as always, the man isn’t giving him any kind of reward for complying. But it still feels like he’s sold out. Like it was back in prison, when he let the cartel use him, to get their protection. _ It was the only way to stay alive then, and this is the only way to get free now. _ But that doesn’t mean it feels any less degrading.

When it’s over, Murdoc won’t stop touching him. Running fingers over all Mac’s scars, the ones he left and the ones that were there before; carding his fingers through Mac’s tangled hair. It’s horrible and Mac wants him to stop. But he can’t even let himself shiver. _ I have to pretend I like it. _

“I must say, this is a pleasant surprise,” Murdoc says. “I was beginning to think I was wrong about you. After all, how long did it take you in prison? To start whoring yourself out to whoever would protect you?” 

Mac chokes back a sob. 

“Still, I did enjoy the defiance. And I’m unsure what brought on this newfound loyalty.” Mac tenses. _ Was I too willing? Did I not make it believable enough? _ “Did you actually...miss me?”

Mac can’t bring himself to answer that. He can’t lie that well. “I’m tired,” he admits. That’s the truth. “And this is the only way out.”_ Still not technically a lie. _

“Are you trying to run away again?” Murdoc asks. “Because if you think I’m going to let you roam around freely just because you claim you’ve changed, you’re sadly mistaken.” HIs fingers hover over the collar and trail down Mac’s spine, making him tremble involuntarily. 

Mac shakes his head. _ The best way to make a lie believable is to make it mostly the truth. _ He remembers Cage saying that once, and hopefully it will work on Murdoc. Anyway, he knows better than to try escaping from _ this house _ again. He’s made it out of the building a few times, but the house is in the middle of nothing and he’s never gotten far, not as weak and drugged as Murdoc has been keeping him. When he’s caught, Murdoc’s retaliations are brutal, and he never makes the same mistake that allowed Mac to slip away again.

He swallows hard, squashing down the tiny spark of hope he’s been keeping alive all this time. He can’t let Murdoc see. _ He thinks he’s breaking me, getting what he wants. _ And as much as it sickens Mac to keep giving in, keep letting Murdoc take and take, he has to keep doing it. For a little longer. 

“No. I’m just tired of fighting. And...I have nowhere else to go.” 

“Good. I’m glad you seem to finally be accepting your place.” Murdoc runs his fingers through Mac’s hair, and he barely supresses a shiver. “It seems you are as intelligent as everyone gives you credit for.”

Mac doesn’t answer. He just clenches a fist in the sheet below him and tries not to scream or cry. _ I’m sorry, Jack, I’m sorry I had to pretend I gave up. I’m sorry I let him use me. I’m sorry I let him take me in the first place, that I didn’t trust you enough to stay. _He forces his mouth to open and whispers the words that are the hardest to say of anything he’s force himself to tell Murdoc. “They never came for me. You were right, Jack doesn’t want me anymore. None of them do.” 

He can feel a bit of the tension go out of Murdoc’s fingers where they’re resting on his hip. _ He knows I would never, ever say that about Jack, not normally. _ “Well, now that you can see the logic here, we can come to a real agreement about what you’re going to do for me.” _ What more could you possibly want from me? _ Murdoc has already used him brutally, subjected him to every possible degradation. “I want you to help me get my son back.”

“What?” But now that he thinks about it, he hasn’t seen Cassian around. _ I thought maybe Murdoc was just...protecting him from the depravity of who he really is. _ But it seems that the real reason Mac hasn’t seen him is that he hasn’t been here to be seen. “What happened?” he asks hoarsely. 

Murdoc stands up and begins pulling on his clothes again, coming around to where he can see Mac’s face. “Cassian was kidnapped while I was on a...job.” Murdoc frowns. “A former...client, Benjamin Liu, who was less than pleased when his scheme to avoid paying me by killing me himself when I came to collect didn't go his way. I left him with...one less limb than he came with, and he’s never really forgiven me.” Mac shudders. “I thought I’d killed him, but it seems that train missed his head and snagged an arm instead.” He shrugs. “Fortunately, I didn’t make the same mistake the second time. He’s floating in the Gulf with three bullets in his skull.”

Mac frowns. He knows he’s off, the lingering head injury and the drugs make reality a slippery thing more often than not, but something about this story doesn’t add up. “So you found him and killed him; where’s Cassian?”

Murdoc raises an eyebrow. “His mother had gotten there first.” 

“His mother?” Mac blinks. He thought she was dead. Didn’t Murdoc say something about her being a job? 

“We were...partners. A long time ago. Once upon a time, you might say. We were young, both of us had just broken loose from the people who mentored us, and we were very determined to prove ourselves.” He shrugs. “Her life had been less than pleasant, and she wanted to forget it in any way she could. I was more than happy to help her find some of that...oblivion. We both wanted the same thing, in that way. She never asked for any pesky commitments. And of course, it helped that we had the same passion for killing.” He glances Mac over. “She’s the one who taught me how much pleasure could be found in taking things slowly.” 

Mac feels like retching. _ What kind of twisted love story is this? _

“Well, one thing led to another, and when she got pregnant, well, she wanted to keep the baby. I was, I will admit, a bit surprised. But it seems her former mentor had wanted a lover without the inconveniences. And she was determined to keep this child.”

“So why aren’t you still together? If you both loved Cassian so much?”

“She doesn’t love him,” Murdoc spits. “All she wants is to make him just like her. To use him to enact her vengeance on the people that took everything from her. He was going to be her perfect tool to burn the world.” Mac shivers, the thought of what James had wanted him for is all too similar. “When I left and took him with me, she said I stole him, and swore she would get him back.”

Mac shakes his head. “You can’t love him either.”

“At the very least, I won’t force him to be what he doesn’t want to become.” He frowns. “All Amber had was families who wanted her to work for them or men who wanted her to be their bitch. All she knew was how to make someone vicious. But she was good at her work. Oh, she was good.” He shakes his head. “She must have heard chatter, maybe even found out that Liu was asking me to trade myself for Cassian’s life. So, when I showed up to save him, she’d already taken him with her. And now, I’m going to get him back.” He smiles, cruel and cold. “And then, I’m going to make sure she can _ never _ lay a hand on my son again.” 

Mac shudders. He remembers the phone calls, the nights Murdoc threw down the phone, stormed into the room, and was more vicious and brutal than ever. _ Every time a lead came up empty. _ The times he left for days, leaving Mac mercifully alone in the cold and dark, then came back and more than made up for it. _ He couldn’t vent his anger on her, so he did on me. _ Mac almost feels sorry for the woman. _ But she must know what she’s risking, crossing him. _ And that makes her just as terrifying. 

“You didn’t have to do all this,” Mac whispers. “I’m not you, I don’t need some sort of extra motivation to save an innocent child.” As much as Murdoc claims to love Cassian, Mac is sure he’s only fooling himself. _ He’s focusing on me, and not on finding Cassian. _

“Oh MacGyver, all this and you’re still so naive.” Murdoc laughs chillingly. “Of course it wasn’t _ necessary _ . But it was _ fun. _ ” He shrugs. “I had to pass the time somehow while I waited for my sources to come through. Some people go fishing, some people read, some people make works of art.” Murdoc smiles. “Everyone needs a hobby, and you’re mine.” He leans in close. “I’ve dreamed of this since you came to see me in prison. It was so thoughtful of you, really.” He runs a hand through Mac’s hair, and Mac shivers and pulls away, caught off guard. “I thought about kidnapping one of your friends, when the time came, to make you comply. Who is the precious new girl, by the way? I would have loved to introduce myself in person.” He shrugs. “But then, I was in San Francisco following up a lead with an old source, and you were simply _ there, _ with nowhere else to turn. To be honest, I was slightly disappointed. After all, I had such a wonderfully elaborate plan, and you made it so _ easy _.” 

“So you kidnapped me because you _ could? _ ” Mac chokes out bitterly. _ What kind of a monster does this? _

“I had nothing better to do,” Murdoc says casually. “And you happened to be there; it was simply meant to be, I suppose. You _ do _ make an excellent distraction for a few hours.” He looks Mac in the eyes, and Mac has to fight not to turn away, not to betray the hate and fury simmering under the surface. _ If he knows what I’m doing, it’s over before it even starts. _He doesn’t want to think about what Murdoc will do to punish him. 

This is sick. _ Why would he hurt me when I might be his only chance to get his son back? _ But then again, nothing Murdoc does really makes sense. “You should...should have asked me earlier. By now...the trail is cold. I could have been more help if you’d…”

“And let you slip away from me, while you were capable of doing it?” Murdoc shakes his head. “Besides, you were in no condition to help anyone, not even yourself, when I found you, Angus. By the time your fever broke, the trail was already cold. But now, now that we’ve come to a mutual...understanding, your skill set should be invaluable when my people come through.” 

He shrugs, then walks across the bedroom, opens the door to the shower, and turns on the water. It’s never warm, the house still has a pump that Mac was able to repair, but making a gas water heater run on a nonexistent propane tank wasn’t feasible. Well, maybe it is, but he just can’t think of what he needs to do. Every cold shower is just another reminder that he’s broken, that his mind won’t always do what he wants it to now. It scares him. 

“Clean yourself up. You look like a filthy whore.” Murdoc drags Mac inside the room, shoves him in under the cold spray and slams the door behind him. Mac doesn’t even bother to look around, Murdoc left nothing in here he could use. Not so much as a half-empty soap bottle or a shower curtain ring. _ I almost managed that time. _If he’d been able to make the explosion just a little bigger...

Mac begins to cry, slowly sliding down the wall as the icy water pours over him. He hurts all over, he can barely move, and now Murdoc wants to drag him with him across the country to hunt down his son and the woman who has him. He hugs his knees to his chest, trembling. 

_ Nothing better to do...everyone needs a hobby, and you’re mine...plaything of a monster…filthy whore. _Gasping, gulping sobs tear out of his chest, and the tears running down his cheeks are more scalding than if he’d been able to turn that broken water heater on the highest setting.

_ I want to go home. Please. I want to go home. _ But he can’t, he did something awful and no one wants him now. He can cry and beg as much as he wants but it won’t change the fact that he’s a murderer. This time for real. No one will listen, they’ll look at him and see a monster. _ I see that in the mirror every day anyway. _

He stands up slowly, running his fingers over the scars on his chest. This is his life now. This is all he is. No matter where he runs to, he can’t run away from this. The best he can do is hope to find a way out from under Murdoc’s thumb. 

He reaches for his neck, then stops at the feel of cold metal tags that don’t have Jack’s name on them. He’s never had the chance to read what these do say, and his fingertips are too calloused and scarred to pick out the letters. Not that he wants to. 

He closes his eyes and takes another shaky breath. _ I’m so sorry, Jack. I’m doing the best I can. Please don’t hate me for it. _

* * *

Murdoc’s phone is chiming when he walks out to the kitchen. He can’t imagine who it could be. He’s talked to all of his sources twice, some three times. No one has anything. He grimaces at the thought of the meeting he just concluded. It was so unfortunate, Ronnie was one of his best informants. But anyone who tries to sell him out, well, there have to be consequences. He still needs to see if he can get the blood to come out of his coat sleeves. 

There’s a message for one of his aliases on the dark web. He recognizes the rambling style, already reading over useless information to find what he needs. _ Luis. _

He opens the message, then glances at the pictures, and after a moment at the user who posted them. _ Oh Riley. Trying so hard to bury your work. _ But he was trolling the dark web when “Artemis37” was still a black hat. He knows her style. And he also knows a string of dummy accounts when he sees them. _ If you weren’t so determined to play the good guys, if you’d actually hacked a few unsuspecting tourists, you might have convinced me. _ But there’s a comment from one user, saying that a friend hacked the accounts and disappeared, that this might be a trick. _ I know it is. _

But that doesn’t mean the information is worthless. Because that picture, although its source date is days old, is still intact. It hasn’t been tampered with, and that means they did find Cassian. _ But if they found him, Amber will have seen that picture too. _ She would have moved him. But if she’s in Columbia, Murdoc knows where she’s headed. 

_ Well, if it isn’t the day for surprises. _ First Angus suddenly acquiescing (not that he totally believes the boy, still, that bit about Jack was quite convincing) and now a lead on Cassian. He hears the water shut off, and walks back to the bathroom and unlocks the door. 

“Hurry up, MacGyver, we’re leaving.” 

Angus is only half-dressed, trying to pull a long-sleeved t-shirt over his head. He cringes away from the opening door, finally getting his head through the shirt and looking up, eyes wide with undisguised fear. He looks so _ young, _ with his hair wet and tousled, and his hands disappearing in the sleeves of his shirt. _ No wonder Dalton thought of him as a son, wanted to protect him. _ He wishes he’d recorded Angus’s desperate little plea, his shattered acceptance that his team hasn’t come for him. _ Oh, not that they haven’t tried. _ He knows they’ve raided every place he’s left them clues to. _ It’s so fun to watch them chase their tails. _ But of course, he never told any of that to MacGyver. _ As far as he knows, the only reason they would be trying to find him is to make him pay for killing that lab tech. _

“Where are we going?” He sounds like a child too, and Murdoc is curious to see if that will last once he weans MacGyver off the drugs. _ For now, it’s simply that his world has slowed down. Helpful, with a mind like his. _ But it’s entirely possible that that blow to the head did some damage as well. And could be the reason it’s been possible to get Angus to cooperate. 

He hasn’t lost his innovative touch, as Murdoc has learned to his chagrin more than once. Which is exactly why he’s taking MacGyver with him now. 

“I have a lead on Cassian’s location. And oddly enough, it’s thanks to your old friends at Phoenix that I know where to start looking.”

MacGyver blinks.

“They seem to think they can trap me by feeding me information, but all they’ve done is tell me exactly where Amber is going.” He chuckles. “She has safe house and a stash in Bogota. She never told me exactly where, we didn’t really share those details unless it was necessary. But she did say it was the one place she was sure no one would find her.” 

An hour later, they’re crammed in the cargo section of a plane, one of Murdoc’s informants who happens to fly drugs for a Columbian distributor. He’s about to make a run, and he has room on the way down. _ Return trip isn’t a concern at the moment. _

Besides a ride, their pilot has been able to provide them with some very helpful current maps of the Bogota area. Murdoc ignores the ones circled in a red pen, the locations of stash sites and drug dealers. Instead, he holds the paper out to MacGyver. 

He knows what places would be his first choice for Amber’s safe house, but he wants to test MacGyver a little. See if he’s really invested in helping. “Where do you think she is?”

Angus studies the map for several minutes, turning it this way and that with the most attractive little frown of concentration. Then he holds it up, pointing out five different locations. 

“These buildings. They’re all old, remote, and have few entry points, but aren’t major historic sites, and they haven’t been marked as in use by cartels.” 

“Excellent.” Murdoc folds up the map, then checks his gun.

“We could narrow it down even further,” MacGyver continues. 

“What would you do? We don’t exactly have satellites we can borrow at will, unlike your former employer.” 

“We don’t need them. All we need is a paper trail.” Angus looks up. “If she’s had it that long, and trusts that it’s safe, she must have bought it. Probably under an alias, but one of them might be familiar enough that you’d recognize it.” 

Angus certainly hasn’t lost his touch. That’s as good a place as any to start.

* * *

CARTAGENA, COLUMBIA

“You think he got the message?” Jack asks, staring up at the building. The windows have been freshly redecorated with some of Matty’s collection of Cassian’s art.

“No way to know.” Riley sits beside him, her rig open in her lap. “It’s not like I could just email these to our San Francisco friend and say ‘hey, pass these on to Murdoc for me, we’re old pals’. We want Murdoc to believe this is a legitimate tip.” 

“Yeah, which means?”

“Which means I had to pose as a hacker who steals personal data from tourists and works out of that area, rip off multiple fake accounts I had to create from scratch, and post all their photos and data to the dark web.” She sighs. “And then we just have to hope that somehow, that trickles back to Murdoc. I tried to make the bait as appealing as possible, and so far we’ve snagged at least a dozen people who tried to use the account information to hack into those Phoenix dummy accounts I set up, but I don’t know who might have gotten their hands on the picture.” 

Jack knows she’s pushed the envelope as far as she can. But he hates not knowing, because this might be their last chance. He had to push hard for Patty’s permission to take the whole team to Columbia. And he knows she can’t afford for them to wait here forever. 

“I’ve stuck around longer than I should have.” Riley closes her rig. “This time I have to leave for good.” Jack nods as she steps out of the car. They already took Leanna and Cage out of the rotation, if people keep seeing the same people around, things could get dicey. But if they ask Jack to pull out, he’ll refuse. Fortunately, he thinks Matty knows better than to even suggest it. 

As if thinking of her has summoned her, at least in spirit, the phone rings. The tone he reserves for Matty alone. He tries not to think about how long it’s been since he heard Mac’s. The last time “TNT” came on the radio, he shut it off so hard he almost put a fist through the dashboard. 

“What, Matty?” He knows he’s snapping, but he’s tired. Stakeouts suck.

“Apparently Murdoc outmaneuvered us, because we just got a hit on Friar. Security cameras flagged him inside a bank in Bogota.” 

“Damn it!” Jack slams a hand against the steering wheel. “Riley!” She turns around. “We have to pull out! Now.”

* * *

BANK OF BOGOTA

MAC’S LAST TIME INSIDE A BANK DIDN’T GO SO WELL

Mac tries not to think about how eerie it suddenly feels seeing the teller windows and the line ropes. He remembers Puerto Rico, it came back in a flash as soon as he stepped through the doors. _ Why is almost every memory I get back a traumatic one? _

Ever since they landed, Murdoc has acted different. He’s focused and scarily fierce, almost like Jack when he goes into what Riley used to call ‘Delta mode’. He doesn’t seem to be thinking about anything but getting what he wants. 

A quick visit to a hacker in a tiny little bodega got them access to the city records, but unfortunately, the system is very much outdated and the ones they need are likely on paper; the government down here is a tangled mess, as Mac well knows. However, they were able to find records of three of the properties in question being appraised and sold by this particular bank. It’s the next step before what Mac is afraid will be a break-in to the municipal records building itself.

Murdoc walks up to one of the offices. In clipped Spanish, he informs the secretary that he’s here to see about some foreclosure sales. All it takes is implication that he’s with a law enforcement agency, and the woman is calling into the manager’s office.

Mac reaches up to fiddle with the collar of his shirt, then thinks better of it. If he moves it too much, it’ll show the collar on his neck, and he’ll be answering a lot of awkward questions. If Murdoc doesn’t solve the problem first, with a bullet. 

Mac edges backward, leaning against the desk, and his fingers find an overlooked paperclip that probably was pulled off a stack of papers and ignored. It’s close to the edge, and he lets his hand close around it. It’s not much, but not much is all he’s ever had to work with. He tucks his hands back at his sides when Murdoc glances at him. 

“He’ll see you in his office,” The secretary says, bustling back out. She ushers them both into a large wood-panelled room where there’s a balding man sitting at a desk. She closes the door and walks away, and Murdoc steps up to the man’s desk.

“I’ll need to see your records of property sales on three buildings in 1998.” Murdoc says.

The manager frowns. “My secretary said you were with Interpol. May I see some identification?”

Murdoc reaches into his coat like he’s going for a badge. Instead, he pulls out his gun, pressing it to the man’s forehead as he leans across the desk. “This is all the identification I need, don’t you think?” He leans back slightly. “Now, if I could have those documents? And please, don’t touch the silent alarm. I’d hate to make a mess on this lovely carpet.” The manager swallows hard and nods. 

Murdoc rattles off the details of the three buildings, and the dates around which they must have been sold, and the manager nods, color leaching out of his face every time Murdoc wiggles the gun in his hand.

“That was before my time. But...but I’m sure it’s here in our records somewhere.” There’s a sheen of sweat on the man’s forehead. He reaches behind him into a filing drawer and fumbles around for several minutes pulls out a folder that Mac can see is marked ‘foreclosures’, with a date range from March to August. 

_ At least we know the general time frame the properties were sold. _ They have three to check here, and Mac wonders what will happen if all of them check out. _ Are we going to hit up every bank in this city? _

“Here, we sold two in the same month.” The man pushes papers across the table. 

Murdoc flips through the first document and pushes it aside. But he stops on the second one, his fingers tracing over the handwriting on the signature. “This is it.” 

The door opens, and Mac turns around to see the grey uniform of a guard.

Someone must have seen the gun, or the bank manager pressed that silent alarm after all. Mac has a split second to realize they’ve been caught, the game is up, before Murdoc turns around and fires point blank into the guard’s chest. He flinches as blood spatter sprays across his own face, and the man falls backward. 

And then Murdoc turns back to the manager, whose face is as pale as the papers on his desk, and shoots him too. 

Mac isn’t sure how they get from the office to the car. He’s afraid to wonder how many more bodies are in their wake. He has the horrible thought that this is like being trapped with James all over again, except that then he wasn’t fully aware of how horrible everything was. Now he is, and it only makes it worse. 

They park a little way outside the battered stucco wall of a run-down villa. Murdoc turns to Mac, raising an eyebrow. There’s blood spatter on his face, but he seems as casually unconcerned with the fact that he just killed at least two people as anyone else would be with stepping on someone’s toes in a crowded room. 

“Get me inside.” There’s nothing there but a pure calm determination to get what he wants. What absolutely chills Mac is that he’s seen this before. And on a more familiar face. _ Jack always acted like he would burn down the world to save me. Like he didn’t care what trail of bodies he left in his wake. _

It hurt too much to remember that before, and to think that Jack hadn’t come. To wonder if he’d given up. But now that determination is the only hope Mac has. He’s leaving a trail, the paperclip he dropped under the desk at the bank was a start, bent into the shape of a Phoenix. _ When word gets out what happened there, I’m sure they’ll come and investigate personally. _ And at least they’ll know he’s still alive. 

But if he wants to stay alive, for right now, he has to help Murdoc get Cassian back. _ What he’ll do when he has him, I don’t know. _ At that point, maybe Mac will have outlived his usefulness. _ Maybe he’d just kill me quickly, finally, and get it over with. _

He looks up at the walls, then at the contents of the car. He can’t see any cameras on the wall, but that means there are probably deadlier traps in place. That wire along the top is probably electrified enough to kill. 

He needs to ground it out. Fortunately, the jumper cables twisted in the trunk are long enough to stretch from the wall to the pieces of scrap metal Mac found laying down in the street a ways and brought back to put next to the wall. When he’s done tossing the cables over the top of the wires and making sure they hook in the ‘v’ of the clamps, he pulls out the tire iron.

_ Car repair kits are good for a lot more than just when you’re stranded on the side of the road. _With a tow strap for a rope and a tire iron grappling hook, he and Murdoc scale the wall and drop down on the other side. 

The only warning that they’ve been made is the crack of gunfire. 

Mac ducks as a burst of shots spatters plaster and stone. Beside him, Murdoc curses, and Mac wonders if he’s been hit. Maybe he can turn this into some kind of standoff, make them both take each other out, and grab Cassian and run. 

But just as the thought crosses his mind, Murdoc grabs his arm painfully tightly. “Okay, Angus, what’s your plan now?”

_ Time for a new plan. _ He glances around. The overgrown garden area they’re using as cover is full of stones and debris. “We trick her into running out of ammunition. When she stops to reload, we make our move.” 

Mac picks up a couple rocks and tosses them as far away from himself and Murdoc as he can. It seems like it’s working, since the gunfire swings in that direction. Bullets shred leaves and thud into tree trunks. He’s picking up another handful when he hears the click of a gun behind him, and turns around to see a woman with greyish brown hair and a thin, cruel face.

“You didn’t think I’d _ really _ fall for that old trick, did you Dennis?” Her voice is rough and grating, and there’s a sinisterly cheerful lilt. “And oh look at that, you brought a _ friend. _ ” She jerks the barrel of her gun toward Mac for a fraction of a second. “Well, come on in. I’d just _ love _ to catch up on everything you’ve been up to. But you won’t need that gun.” 

This woman is as much a devil as Murdoc. Mac’s surprised she hasn’t shot him yet, but that only means that what she has in mind is probably worse. 

Murdoc crouches down, laying his hangun on the ground, but the next second he has a knife in his hand and he’s launching himself at the woman. She goes down, her own gun flying out of her hands as she reaches up to stop the knife from plunging into her chest. 

Mac takes advantage of the whole thing and runs. He expects every second to get a bullet in the back, every step of the way to the fence, every time he pulls himself a little higher on his makeshift rope. But it looks like Murdoc and Amber are too distracted. He tumbles over the other side, bruises aching, and stumbles to his feet. He doesn’t dare take the car now, it’s probably already been tied to the bank shooting. He just keeps going, as fast as he can, one foot in front of the other. 

_ The police here want to arrest me for that shooting in the bank, Murdoc will make my life hell all over again if he gets his hands on me, and...Phoenix will never trust me again. Not after what I did to Jill. _

There’s nowhere he can turn...except the one thing that is always going to be a constant, the one thing he remembered even when everything else he knew was gone. _ Jack will never, ever hurt me. _ He can always trust Jack. _ Jack promised me once, that if we had to, he’d keep me safe and go on the run with me. _ He only remembered that moment a few days ago, when he was cold and miserable and dreaming of falling asleep with Jack holding him and keeping him warm. _ He said he’d never, ever let something bad happen to me if he could help it. _ It’s the only promise he still trusts, the only hope he has left. 

He reaches for his neck, then feels that damn collar again, instead of the dog tags he was searching for. He wants it off. Whatever Murdoc did to get it on him, he made it pull tighter any time Mac struggled with it. But he was never able to see how it was fastened. Murdoc knew better than to leave him alone with a mirror he could break and turn into a weapon.

The broken-off car mirror down an alley is a good enough substitute, and by turning the fastening of the collar around to the front, Mac can see how it’s been attached. It takes longer than he wishes it did to work the fastening free, and more than once the fragment of metal he’s using to pry it loose gashes into his neck, drawing blood. He probably looks like the victim of a vampire, he thinks wryly, remembering one of Bozer’s horror scripts. _ Bozer. I wonder what he thinks happened to me? I want to see him again, I want to see all of them. _

_ I want to go home. _

He turns the collar over, and chokes at the sight of the words on the metal tag. _ Mine. Murdoc. _ It’s painfully short and pointed. _ He replaced Jack’s name with his own. _ He probably saw those dog tags as some mark of possession. _ I wouldn’t be surprised, with all the rest of the twisted ways he thinks love works. _And he’d been determined to prove that he was the one who owned Mac now. 

He shudders at the feel of the scabs and scars under his fingers when he touches his neck. Murdoc did something to the edges, they’re sharp. Every time he pulled it tight, or Mac struggled with it, it cut into the tender skin. He’s pretty sure some of that was deep enough to scar permanently. 

He tosses the collar away, but then thinks better of it and shoves it in his pocket instead. As much as he hates keeping anything that reminds him of that time, it’s better than leaving it out here to be found by just anyone. He’ll destroy it later. 

He blends in with the chaos on the streets. There are more than a few addicts stumbling from wall to wall. He keeps his head down, his hair isn’t as blond as it used to be, but he’s still pale enough that he doesn’t fit in with the general appearance of the people in the alleys and shadows. 

He stumbles against a table, and earns himself some swearing in Spanish from the vendor, but also a few coins he tucks into a pocket. He needs them for a phone. When he finds one. 

He feels a little guilty for stealing the money, but no one is hurt and it was only a few coins. He’s done so much worse. He works his way along the streets until he finds a building that advertises a pay phone inside. 

One thing he’s never forgotten, no matter what else, is Jack’s phone number. He dials it with shaking fingers, hoping and praying that the man picks up. 

“Dalton here.” The voice is clipped, Jack’s answer to an unknown number while he’s in the middle of something important. _ He’s ready to make a telemarketer quake in their boots. _

Mac almost smiles, before the twinge of pain in his ribs makes itself known. He looks down at the red coating his fingers, then back at the wall beside the phone, plastered in advertisements in Spanish, a few held into the plaster with long pins, then out the window at the abandoned building across the street, and the padlocks on its front and side doors. 

“Please, Jack, help me.” 

* * *

Jack doesn’t bother to stop by the hotel they were staying at. Cage, Bozer, and Leanna will pack up his and Riley’s things, not that they had much anyway. He heads straight for the airport, where their jet, per Matty’s orders, should be waiting and ready. 

Riley’s still working on her rig, typing rapidly, probably bringing up the security camera footage Matty was referring to. And then she stops. 

“Jack, something happened at the bank.” Riley’s voice is desperate. “Police scanner chatter in Bogata says there was a shooting. And the cameras...”

Jack clenches his hands around the steering wheel so hard he thinks he might rip it right out of the car. “Oh God, Riley, he’s not…”

“No. But...Jack, what Murdoc did in there…” She swallows hard. “We need to find Mac now, before he does something stupidly brave and becomes the next body in that maniac’s wake.” Jack nods. Stupidly brave is Mac’s default setting. 

He pulls into the airport, parking the car haphazardly, grabbing his things from inside it, and stowing them inside. He considers grabbing himself a drink, but if they’re this close, he could be needing to make a tactical assault as soon as they land, and he has to be at the top of his game.

He paces beside the jet until the other car arrives, and the moment they’re all inside, the pilot is taking off. Jack sits and stares out the window beside him. _ Come on, Mac, hang in there, we’re coming for you. We’re almost there. Just hold on. _

Riley sits down across from him, setting her rig on the table between them. Her hands are shaking, and she rubs them on her jeans. Jack studies her face, the dark circles below her eyes, the greasy, untamed hair, the nails bitten down to the quicks. “It got worse,” Riley says quietly, and Jack stiffens. _ They didn’t find his body. She wouldn’t be able to keep it together if they had. _

“Mac’s wanted for the murder of the bank guard, and attempted murder of the manager, who is in the hospital in a coma.” Riley sighs. “As an accomplice.”

_ Oh hell no. _ Jack’s sure Mac is already blaming himself for not being able to stop Murdoc’s murderous rampage. This is only going to make it worse. And he can’t imagine the consequences if Mac is caught before they find him and thrown in a prison down here. Then again, he wonders how bad it will be anyway. Murdoc certainly made no secret of what he was doing to Mac. _ How much of the kid I know is going to be left when we find him? _

He knows Mac survived two years of absolute hell in prison. But there, he’d been able to escape after a while, into solitary. And there, nothing was personal. These guys were just looking for a quick fix, or a bargaining chip. Murdoc...Murdoc will have made it a special form of torture. And he has no way of knowing how recovered Mac is from the head injury. _ What if Murdoc was able to manipulate him even more, convinced him he deserved it? _

“An accomplice?” Leanna asks. Jack jumps, he didn’t realize she was listening in. 

“Just because he was with Murdoc. Mac doesn’t even like guns, he’d never hurt anyone.” He blocks out the memory of staring down the barrel of a nine mil in a warehouse, and the cold, empty blue eyes behind it. _ He was so lost that he didn’t even remember so much of what makes him him. _

Leanna nods, but her eyes don’t leave his. “For what it’s worth, Jack, when we find him, I think you need to remember to be careful.”

“What exactly is that supposed to mean?” Jack growls. 

“I saw the briefings on the last mission. James twisted him. Made Mac help him, because of his amnesia. I know you said Mac was remembering you at the end, but what if Murdoc managed to do the same thing?”

“Mac wouldn’t hurt us.” Jack’s voice is icy. “I don’t care what it _ looks like, _” he snarls. “If he’s working with Murdoc, he’s not doing it voluntarily. And we’re going to bring him home.” 

Leanna nods. Jack sighs. He knows she didn’t mean to suggest that Mac would actually turn, that she’s only reminding him he might be facing two people fighting him instead of just one. But he takes everything personally these days. 

Jack’s phone buzzes. He fishes it out, prepared to hear Matty say they’re going to need the jet back or that somehow this has all gotten worse again. But the number isn’t her. It isn’t even familiar. 

_ Oh God no, not Murdoc. Please. Not Murdoc. _

“Dalton here,” he answers crisply, trying not to let the fear or the fury bleed through. He won’t give this creep the satisfaction. 

There’s a long pause, filled only with raggedly panting breaths. Then a single gasped plea. “Please, Jack, help me.”

“Mac?” Jack whispers, not sure how safe it is for the kid to be talking to him. _ Last time he called me, Murdoc punished him for it. _He swallows at the thought of the picture that has burned itself into his mind. “Mac, are you safe? Is Murdoc there?”

“He’s not. I don’t know where he is. I got away.” Mac’s voice is the breathless sound he has when he’s hurt, scared, or a combination of both. “Please, Jack, come get me.” He sounds lost. So lost. Like a kid who got in over their head somewhere and is finally calling their parents to come help them. 

“I’m gonna, kiddo, just stay on the phone. Just keep talking to me. Okay?” He shoots a text to Riley to trace the number, but he doesn’t let up his litany of encouragement. “I’m gonna come get you, you just have to keep talking to me.”

“Not enough money,” Mac mumbles, and Jack frowns, confused, before he realizes the kid must have found a pay phone. “But there’s a house across the road. It’s em-empty, I can wait th-there.” He sounds terrible, slurring and stumbling over his words. Jack doesn’t dare press him for more details, Mac sounds close enough to a panic attack already.

“I’m coming Mac. I promise. I’m gonna come get you. It’s gonna be okay, kiddo. It’s gonna be okay.” And then the line goes dead.

Jack turns to Riley. “Please tell me..”

She looks up from her rig. “It’s a pay phone in a neighborhood in the north end of the city. I’m sending you exact coordinates. And there is an abandoned building on the opposite side of the road.” She sounds almost as frantic as Jack feels. “We’re so close, Jack, we’re almost there.”

“We’re going to find him. This time, we’re going to find him.” Jack rests a hand over hers. _ All those false alarms, all those failed raids, all these months of combing through the dregs of anything that could help us. We’re not going to lose this. We’re not going to let him slip away again. _

The second the plane touches the runway, Jack is on the move. He’s got his full tac gear, extra mags, and the entire team behind him.

The whole drive there, Jack prays this isn’t a trap. That it isn’t Murdoc playing them all, letting Mac out on a leash so he can catch the whole team. _ Because the one thing that would shatter Mac beyond saving would be if Murdoc killed us in front of him and let him believe it was his doing that we died. _Mac would never be able to recover from that.

But there doesn’t appear to be any sign of a trap when Jack surveys the area. He sends Cage and Riley out to scout for any hidden sniper nests or technological traps. He hasn’t forgotten what happened at the junkyard. But both of them call in that the area is clean. 

“Let me go in.” Jack has no idea how bad it will be when he finds Mac, how traumatized the kid is going to be after all this. _ Hopefully, since he called me, he’ll trust me to help him. _

Jack reaches for the lock on the side door, noticingthat the padlock is undone. There are a couple long pins in the dirt next to it, and the sight sends a thrill through Jack’s heart. _ He hasn’t lost his touch. _ Maybe there _ is _ more of Mac left than he’s afraid of. And then he sees the smears of rusty red on the padlock and door, and his heart plummets.

“Mac?” He whispers. He makes his way slowly up a set of rickety stairs, cringing at the places blood is smeared on the wall. _ Kid, what happened? _ “Mac, it’s me, it’s Jack. I’m coming, okay?”

“J-jack?” He wants to cry with relief. Mac is still alive, and he knows him. He takes the rest of the stairs at a gallop, shoves open the door at the top, then stops dead at the sight of the figure in the far corner of the room, leaning against the wall. 

_ Oh God. _ Mac is barely recognizable. He’s so terribly thin. His hair has grown out almost to his shoulders and it’s a dull combination of faded black on the tips and an unhealthy, dull mousy blond near the roots. The shirt and pants he’s wearing look like they might fall right off him, and Jack can see thick scars on his neck above the ragged, sweat-stained collar. _ Oh Mac, what has he done to you? _

But the worst thing is Mac’s eyes. The pupils are blown wide like a junkie’s, and Jack’s pretty sure, coupling that with the trembling hands, that the kid’s high as a kite on something. And...he doesn’t see an ounce of the hopeful, enthusiastic Mac he knows in there. 

“Mac?”

“J-Jack…” Mac’s voice trails off. “I…” He’s shaking even harder now, shivering in spite of the fact that it’s sweltering, must be over a hundred degrees in this room.

“Yeah, kiddo, It’s me. I’m here, and we’re going home. Okay?”

“I can’t come home,” Mac whispers. “I’m a murderer. It’s my fault. I killed Jill, and they’re going to arrest me and send me back to prison. I can’t go back there, Jack, I can’t.” His words are almost incoherent, falling over themselves and tangling together. 

“Mac, Jill’s not dead. She was in a coma for a while, but she’s alive.”

“She’s alive?” And a tiny spark leaps up in those deadened eyes. 

“Yeah, she is. No one is going to arrest you. It’s safe. You can come home. No one will send you back to prison. I promise.” 

Mac crumples into Jack's arms, sobbing. "You don't know what he did to me. You don't know what I've done," he wails. 

"Oh kid. Oh kid." Jack gently runs a hand through Mac’s tangled hair. "Nothing you could ever do would make me stop loving you." Mac sags against him, as if the only thing that was keeping him on his feet was pure adrenaline. Blood oozes sluggishly from a wound in his side, hidden byhis dark shirt until Jack touched the warm wetness, and he’s suddenly deadweight. Jack stumbles momentarily; it’s not so much that the kid’s heavy, because he’s skinnier than Jack ever remembers seeing him, it’s the sudden change, as if Mac’s a puppet whose every string has just been slashed. _ A puppet. _ The analogy leaves a bitter taste in Jack’s mouth. That’s what he was, to Murdoc. 

Jack picks him up and holds him, cradling his poor kid’s ruined body against his chest. Mac is so weak now, he can’t lift his head. He just whimpers, like a wounded animal, and tries to seek out Jack’s comfort, shivering helplessly as his body gives in to the stress of the pain and the drugs. And all Jack can do is hold him and cry. 

He forces himself to stumble out of that building, out to where sirens screech in from the road. He ignores Riley and Bozer’s shocked gasps at the sight of the wretched condition Mac is in. He can’t meet Leanna and Cage’s eyes. 

“The medical exfil chopper is en route already,” Riley says, her voice choked. _ She knew we’d need it. _ Maybe she saw the blood on the door. “ETA is ten minutes.” 

Jack pulls off his outer shirt and presses it against Mac’s side. Mac hisses and flinches, batting at Jack’s hands. “No, kiddo, leave it. We gotta put pressure on it.”

“Mac?” Bozer asks softly, walking up and crouching down in Mac’s line of sight. Jack can see the worry and fear creasing the young man’s face. _ He has no idea if Mac will remember him or not. _After all, Jack was the one Mac called first.

“Boze?” Mac asks, sounding both shocked and relieved. “You’re here?” 

“Yeah, I’m here.” Bozer takes one of Mac’s bloodstained hands gently. “I’m here, Mac. We all are.”

There’s a rumble of tires as the exfil van pulls up, Jack knows it’s one of the ones where the back is fully kitted out as an ambulance. _ They can’t land a chopper on this street without a lot of attention, and we’re not technically sanctioned to be in country. _But this will be good enough, until they get to a site they can airlift from. 

He stands back, feeling like the world is blurring as he watches the medical team load Mac onto a gurney and pull him up inside the back of the van. He climbs in as well; the others will take the car back. He has to stay with Mac. He can’t bear to let the kid out of his sight again. One nurse cuts Mac’s shirt away and replaces the wadded cloth against his side with a more sterile pad of dressings. _He’s nothing but bone._ _Bone and scars. _Jack cringes when he sees the rough letter cut into Mac’s bony chest. _Murdoc, you monster. _The ragged ‘M’ rises and falls with each of Mac’s shaky breaths. 

It seems like being closed into the back of the van and having some of his clothes taken away stole what little coherent thought Mac had left. He keeps shoving everyone, even Jack, away from him, curling up into a tiny huddle and whimpering, little soft sounds that shatter Jack’s heart. It looks like he’s trying to make himself invisible. 

“He’s fighting me,” the nurse holding an IV line says sharply. “I have to start an IV, he’s severely dehydrated and coupling that with the bullet wound, he’s about to go into shock. But he won’t let me insert the needle.” She shakes her head. “He has track marks all over both arms, I’m assuming Murdoc was drugging him to keep him docile.” 

Jack nods, that’s the likeliest bet at this point. “I’ll do it.”

“You’re not trained…”

“He needs this, right? And he won’t stop fighting you. I’m field medicine certified, I can start an emergency line.” Jack takes a step closer to the gurney where Mac is lying, too small, too pale, too _ still _ . Mac shouldn’t be still, he’s the living embodiment of that kinetic energy he’s always rambling on about. “Let me do this. He trusts me.” _ It’s a hell of a lot better than trying to restrain him. _ Jack knows that’s the trauma team’s next option, and he can’t stop seeing that picture Murdoc sent so long ago, the ropes binding Mac’s hands to the headboard.

“Here.” Scottie Jansen takes the line from the younger nurse and hands him the equipment. She’s been working exfil trauma teams since as long as Jack has been with Phoenix. She knows him, and she knows he can’t be argued with when one of his own is on the line. She and Erika Cohen, their Eastern Europe trauma leader, are the best in-field medics Jack’s ever worked with.

He rolls Mac’s arm over and gasps. The skin is covered in tiny specks and bruises, from a distance they were hard to see, but up close, it’s viscerally horrifying. And from the amount of the marks, it’s been happening regularly. But there isn’t time to think about that, he needs to deal with what Mac needs _ right now _, and that is this IV. 

The kid’s left arm is much too scarred to get the IV in. And when Jack takes his other arm, it’s just as bad. He could probably still tap a low vein in one of the less damaged areas, but if he has to keep trying, he’s sure Mac’s fragile momentary calmness will wear off. He has to get this done fast. 

He moves up Mac’s arm to the bicep, where the vein is standing out fairly clearly against the emaciated muscle. 

Jack feels for the vein, praying Mac isn’t too dehydrated for him to get this to work. The process is muscle memory, for the most part. But when he presses the needle against Mac’s skin, Mac’s eyes fly open and he starts grabbing for Jack’s arm. Jack wants to cry at how easy it is to break the grip of those weak, thin fingers. 

“No, please, stop.” Mac thrashes weakly. 

“No, kiddo, I gotta do this. It’s gonna make you better. Whatever Murdoc was giving you, we have to flush it out of your system.” Mac nods a little, then lays back, fists clenched, eyes closed as Jack finishes. 

When it’s over, they both relax, taking deep, shaky breaths. Mac opens his eyes to look at Jack, the pain in them is agonizing, but they’re clearer than they were before. Jack hopes it’s because whatever drug Murdoc gave him is wearing off. 

"Why?" Mac whispers pleadingly, staring at Jack with tear-flooded eyes. "Why does everyone want to hurt me?"

Jack wishes he had a good answer. Well, a better one than he has. "They can see all the light and goodness in you, Mac, and they either want to take it for themselves or destroy it."

"There's nothing good about me left. I’m worthless, you should get rid of me." _ Damn James for putting those words in his head, in his mouth. _Because this is that monster talking. 

"No, no, Mac, that's not true." Jack takes the kid’s fragile hand in his own. “You are worth the whole world to me. Don’t you ever forget that.”

“I can’t.” Mac’s voice is soft. “I couldn’t. I remembered that. There was so much else gone, but...I knew you cared.” 

Jack doesn’t move to wipe the tears away. He doesn’t care who sees. 

Mac starts to shiver and thrash, and Jack freezes. Scottie steps up beside him, looking down at Mac with a frown. “Withdrawal is probably setting in. I’m afraid it’ll only get worse, and I can’t push pain medication until we know what’s in his system.”

“How soon will we know?”

“I’m going to draw off a blood sample and put it through a quick and dirty analysis when we reach the medical facilities in the exfil plane. But the truth is, we probably shouldn’t do anything until Phoenix Med has a chance to do a full-spectrum tox screening.” She reaches for the cloth shoved up against Mac’s side. “It looks like the wound was superficial and has stopped bleeding, but we need to get a look at it.” Jack nods. “How badly do you think he’ll react to it being irrigated and inspected?”

“Probably not great. And…” Jack lets his voice trail off. “And when are you going to check for...for…” He’s sure they would have informed a medical exfil team of the rest of Mac’s likely injuries and trauma.

“At this point, given that we know the perpetrator, it doesn’t appear to have happened recently, and MacGyver is already mostly incoherent, we’re going to hold off until we can at least get him into a more comfortable setting. I’d like to do it once we’re in the air, but if he protests or indicates that it’s causing more stress or trauma, I think the harm would outweigh any good we might do. I’m going to ask that the blood sample is tested for any potential diseases.” Jack shudders. He knows, from a few things Mac’s said, that this wouldn’t be the first time he was treated for something like that. A decent doctor in the prison infirmary had known what was happening and managed to catch one infection early enough to prevent serious harm. But Jack can’t imagine what could happen if Mac gets one of the worse ones. 

“Just...let me be there with him.” Jack doesn’t want to do anything to make this worse, but if someone has to strip the kid he’d rather it wasn’t a stranger. _ I’m sorry, Mac, I’m so sorry, I should never have let this happen to you. _

“Shall we get started?” Scottie holds up the kit for wound dressing, and Jack nods, starting to peel back the stained dressings. _ Hold on, Mac, we’re gonna fix you. I promise. _

* * *

THE PHOENIX FOUNDATION

ONE DAY LATER

“Riley, have you found him?” Patty’s voice is shaking with barely controlled fury. She’s been on the phone all day with Columbian authorities and any and all US intelligence presence in the country, but from the looks of things, she’s gotten nowhere. Neither has Riley. 

“No. The building Mac told us about has no cameras. And I’m checking satellites now, but there’s no sign of Murdoc, Amber, or Cassian.” She bites her lip. “And as far as I can tell, there was nothing over the area at the time...at the time Mac escaped.” 

“Police raided the compound based on an anonymous tip that linked the car used by the bank shooter to the location.” Patty sighs. “They found blood, but no bodies, and no sign of Cassian. So at least one of his parents survived long enough to dispose of a body if necessary, and get Cassian out of the compound.” Riley nods. Mac told Jack fragments of the story on the jet, before he lapsed into unconsciousness halfway home. And when Jack told her, she thought it was possibly the most twisted thing she’s ever heard. _ Should I have expected anything less when it came to Murdoc? _

“You should get some rest.” Patty lays a hand on Riley’s shoulder. _ She’s not wrong, but... _Riley spent most of the day with Mac after they got him out of surgery for the wound in his side, even though he slept for most of it. She came up here to work so seeing what she was doing wouldn’t cause him stress. But she can’t imagine going home while Mac is still suffering. 

“I’m not going to stop until we find him.” Riley would tie up Friar’s diagnostics for the next twelve years to get the slightest lead. _ What he did to Mac is unforgivable. _

She saw the medical reports. Well, the part of them she managed to read before reaching for the nearest trash can and puking until her whole body hurt. _ How could anyone do that to another human being? _ Riley has seen plenty in her years in the clandestine services. She’s seen the victims of genoocides, human trafficking, and chemical weapons. She’s seen villages ravaged by war, communities slaughtered in senseless conflicts. But there’s still something about the personal, intimate cruelty of this that breaks down every wall she’s managed to build to protect herself. 

Most people who kill distance themselves from their victims. Even people like her and Jack, who tell themselves every day that they’ve done the right thing, can’t think too long and hard about the people they’ve left bullets in. Cage doesn’t say much about what it’s like to interrogate someone, and neither does Patty, but Riley knows both of them are experts at shutting down emotion and doing the job. But what Murdoc did to Mac...it wasn’t about finishing a job. It was about tearing Mac apart piece by piece, torturing him the best ways Murdoc knew how to. _ How he could bear to do that, day in and day out, for almost three months... _Riley has dealt with a lot of the worst of humanity, but Murdoc seems like the most soulless of all. 

* * *

PHOENIX MEDICAL

Patty stops outside the door of Mac’s room. Somehow, the silence is the worst thing of all. 

She’s seen a lot of agents rescued after months of torture. Some are furious, recklessly trying to leave the hospital as soon as possible, hell bent on revenge. But they’re usually the lucky ones. The silent ones are the ones who never go back. The ones who get psychologically mandated discharges. The ones they find two months later with an empty pill bottle or an empty round from a gun on the floor beside them. 

She steps inside. Riley is back, leaning over the bed and talking about nothing important. Leanna, Bozer, and Cage have all claimed chairs, and Jack is actually sitting on the bed itself. 

Patty sits down on the end of the bed across from Jack, looking at Mac lying back against the pillows. His face looks grey and washed out against the white bed and green hospital gown. 

Matty looks up from where she’s standing near the head of Mac’s bed. She’s been here while Patty was in the office. It’s possibly the hardest for the two of them. They can’t stay here all day like the others. There’s still an agency to run, an agency that is bigger than any one agent. But at the moment it doesn’t feel that way. Mac is the soul of this place now, and it felt wrong without him. 

Mac shudders and moves, curling in on himself, and Patty feels Jack tense up. Whatever drug cocktail Murdoc was using is taking a long, long time to clear out of his body. It’s been five days since he was flown in, and the withdrawal is showing no signs of clearing up. It’s only getting worse, if anything. 

Mac moans softly, fists clenched, and Jack hops down from the bed, kneeling beside the head of it and taking one of Mac’s hands. Mac’s fingers close tightly around Jack’s, and Patty can see the pained grimace on his face. Still, she knows he would take all of the pain in the world if it would spare Mac one second of this. 

None of them had any idea, two years ago, that this is what they would become. She knows Jack would have scoffed at the idea that ‘Carl’s Jr.’ would be anything more than a thorn in his side. That Matty would have said the son of the man who took away the person she loved most would turn out just like his father, dangerous and heartless. And now those two are sitting one on each side of Mac as if they’re his parents.

Sometimes she feels like she’s losing this family. She used to be closer to them, but this job has pulled her away. It even forced her to step back from searching for Mac. But the truth is, her job is to protect all of her family. Everyone in this room depends on her to protect the agency that employs them and has their backs in the field. 

Still, it’s at moments like this that all of that falls away, that she’s just another member of Mac’s crazy little family, another person whose heart breaks seeing him so damaged. She slides off the bed, stepping over to Matty’s side and resting her hand gently on Mac’s arm, feeling the tension in the muscles and the trembling so painfully strong it feels like he might shake apart in her hands. 

After what feels like forever, the tremors ease, and Mac uncurls slightly. Some of the tension slips out of his body, and his eyes even open a little, the blue seeming almost brighter than ever, a feverish kind of glitter. He blinks a few times, turning so he can see who is in the room with him, and when he’s apparently satisfied that he’s not alone, he relaxes even more, and his breathing evens out as his eyes slip closed again. 

Patty meets Jack’s eyes, and sees that his are glossy with tears. He squeezes Mac’s hand a little tighter, and they sit there, in a circle, for what feels like an eternity. All of them, in their own way, prepared to protect one of their own from whatever comes.

Mac’s birth father may be sitting in a reinforced cell in the basement, but the truth is, that man isn’t his family at all. This is his family, and if anything can save him, it will be them. That’s the one thing Patty is certain of. 

* * *

ONE WEEK LATER

Riley feels ragged, like there are loose strings hanging from every piece of this op. Murdoc, Cassian, and Amber are in the wind. No bodies have been found, they have to assume all three are still alive. The warrant for Mac in Bogota is still being cleared up, the police are refusing to believe, despite all evidence, that he was acting under duress during the bank shooting, and now that the manger has died as well, there’s even more pressure to make someone pay. They may not be able to take Mac to missions in Columbia anymore.

Then again, that’s assuming Mac will ever be capable of going back in the field at all. Riley wouldn’t blame him if as soon as he’s able to he left here and put the Phoenix in the rearview for good. She doesn’t know how he’ll manage to stay, to keep going back to the field, after all this pain. 

Jack's refused to leave Mac's side during all of it. Through the absolute agony of the withdrawals, through Mac's nightmares and anger and fear and pain, Jack has never left. Mac still fights any and all injections, and Jack’s been the one administering all of them, he’s the only one Mac will even calm down slightly for. He’s also the one who’s been giving Mac baths and dealing with anything of that nature; Mac seems to know that Jack’s hands aren’t going to hurt him. Still, Jack says Mac shivers whenever his skin is touched, and that he hates having anyone run a hand through his hair. 

Mac hasn’t spoken since the flight back. The doctors say it’s probably just a reaction to the severe trauma, a symptom of PTSD. There’s no physical cause for it, according to their exams. Mac whimpers and cries and moans, but he never speaks. And it breaks Riley’s heart. 

She catches Bozer in the medical bay lobby, where both of them are getting cups of bitter black coffee from the vending machine. She’s been researching trauma-related nonverbal cases, and she thinks she might be onto something. Many times nonverbal patients find it easier to talk to an animal than a human. And Mac already has a therapy-trained dog at home, who according to Bozer is going stir crazy every time Bozer goes home to take care of him. _ He can smell Mac on Bozer’s clothes, but he doesn’t know where he is. _

“Boze?” She asks. He barely glances at her, he looks as worn down as she feels. “Do you...want to try something crazy?” 

“What do you mean, something crazy?” Bozer asks. 

Riley lowers her voice and moves away from the reception desk. “Like sneaking Mickey into the infirmary crazy.” 

“We don’t actually have to sneak him in, he’s registered as a PTSD service animal,” Bozer says. “But yeah. I think we should do that.” He shrugs more halfheartedly than Riley has ever seen Bozer do _ anything. _ “It couldn’t hurt.” 

Which is how, the next morning, Riley and Bozer end up walking Mickey, with a service dog bandanna tied around his collar, through the Phoenix to medical. Several times, Mickey stops and sniffs the air, especailly when they walk past R&D, maybe a bit of Mac’s familiar scent is still lingering in the air. Jill stopped by Mac’s room, she’s still in PT for the last of the recovery from her burns, and she, like Mac, will have some permanent scarring, but he seemed glad to see she was still alive, and she kept the slightly damaged side of her face turned away from him the whole time. _ It’ll take time for any of us to recover from what happened that day. _

Mickey’s already been cleared with Dr. Grey and the desk receptionist, so Riley and Bozer walk straight on through the lobby and down the hall to Mac’s room. Mickey gets more and more excited the closer they get, straining his leash and wagging his tail faster and faster. 

_ This was the right thing to do. _ She knows it the second Mickey explodes into a black and tan blur as he catches sight of Mac in the bed. The way he throws himself at Mac with the reckless abandon of a loyal dog who cares about nothing except that his person has come back is nothing short of both heartbreaking and heartwarming, at the same time. 

_ We’ve all been tiptoeing. Treating Mac like he’s fragile. And all we’ve been accomplishing is reminding him of how broken he is. Reminding him that we all see it, that we can’t pretend things will be normal, the way he wants to. _

But Mickey doesn’t care about anything that’s happened to Mac. He doesn’t know and it doesn’t bother him. He’s simply overjoyed at having someone back that he missed. And as Riley watches Mac cry and bury his hands and face in Mickey’s fur, she wonders if maybe that’s the secret. _ We got Mac back. And he’s so much more than just another broken rescue that we’ve pulled out of somewhere terrible. He’s our family. Our little brother, our son. _ It’s time to start seeing that, proving they still can. 

* * *

FOUR WEEKS LATER

The next time Jack sees that son of a bitch he’s going to put a bullet between Murdoc’s eyes. For what he’s done to Mac, he deserves it. 

All the progress they made since their first mission together feels like it’s been wiped away. They’re right back in the same place Mac was after Bishop. Arguably, it’s even worse. Bishop was a week and one incident. This was three months and God only knows how many times, and Murdoc is absolutely sadistic. 

Mac has horrible nightmares every time he falls asleep. He trembles constantly, his whole body vibrating on high alert every second of the day, even after he comes down off the shakes from the withdrawals. Even with the drugs gone from his system, Mac still gets blinding headaches that strike without warning. His emotions are more out of whack than ever; he has a short temper that’s so utterly unlike Mac that it catches Jack off guard, and he also breaks down sobbing for no reason whatever. Jack wonders if the damage is permanent, a fault of the drugs Murdoc was using. Or it’s the lingering effects of the head injury that gave him amnesia and was never properly medically treated. Either option terrifies Jack.

He doesn’t want to use the words “brain damage” and “Mac” in the same sentence, not even in his thoughts, but the fact remains that it’s possible. Because this Mac is a very different person than Jack remembers. _ But no matter what, I’m not gonna give up on him and I will never stop caring about him. _

Jack pities the Phoenix therapist who’s assigned Mac’s case. The few details the kid revealed to him, mostly when he was half-delirious, are enough to make Jack absolutely furious. Murdoc drugged him repeatedly, and never properly treated him for the injuries he had in the first place. His back and shoulder are badly burn-scarred, and there’s a permanent ring of shiny reddened marks around his neck from where a _collar,_ _a fucking collar, how sick is that,_ had been. The medical team found it when they went through the pockets of the pants Mac had been wearing when they found him. Jack wants to throw it in Mac’s fire pit and burn it all to ashes. And even though Mac doesn’t talk about it when he’s coherent, Jack’s heard more than enough about everything else Murdoc has done. 

Jack doesn’t want to think that things might never, ever be the same. He’s been going to a Phoenix therapist himself, and at first it was a cheap attempt to use interrogation tactics on her and get her to spill something about Mac, but she managed to outsmart him and turn the tables. By the time he found himself telling her he feels like this is all his fault, that he should have done better at the warehouse, that he should have gotten Mac back then, he realizes maybe he needed this as much as the kid did.

Physically, Mac is recovering as well as can be expected. His bullet wound is almost completely healed, and his head injury is probably as good as it will ever get again. MRIs and CAT scans, done almost daily at first, and now weekly, are showing some changes from the normal patterns Mac had on file, but nothing that is concerning the professionals to any serious degree. Mac will likely struggle more with fine motor skills, though, and _ that _ concerns Jack _ . _ Mac’s hands are half of what allows him to do his job in the field. Jack had been afraid of what could happen if Murdoc had broken Mac’s fingers or hands, but this is almost worse. _ If he struggles to do his job, he’ll start seeing himself as a liability again. _And there’s the real concern that it will only get worse as he gets older. As likely will the light-induced migraines. 

They’re only lucky in one respect. Murdoc wasn’t carrying any deadly diseases. Mac’s still in treatment for something that may or may not be simply a false positive due to his previous bout of it in prison, but they’re going to go with better safe than sorry on that front. Jack honestly thinks it’s a miracle that Mac hasn’t gotten HIV after everything. He’s been fortunate. If you can call anything about the hell he’s lived through ‘fortunate’. 

And now, Mac is insisting that he wants to get back to the way things were. Go back to his team and the field. Jack promised he’d bring it up with Matty, but he can’t promise more than that. This level of trauma is more than enough to bench any agent for the rest of their lives. 

He gets exactly the answer he was expecting. 

“I know Mac wants to go back, but the truth is with the medical reports, that’s hard to justify, and no psych evaluator in their right mind would let him pass. Especially not right now. He can do a rotation in R&D, wait a few years, and try again, but there are no guarantees. He might never be cleared for field duty again, Jack.” Matty’s voice is soft, comforting, but nothing makes this hurt less. “But we are going to do a full psych eval on him before he’s discharged from medical. Just to be sure…”_ To be sure he isn’t suicidal. _ Jack doesn’t need to be told.

He knows it’s not like that. If Mac was going to do that, he would have done it a long time ago. But Jack also doesn’t want the kid going into that meeting thinking he’s going to be able to convince the person meeting with him to clear him for the field. And he especially doesn’t want not being allowed to be an active agent any longer to make Mac feel worthless. _ That’s how he would see it. Like he wasn’t any good to us anymore. _

He knows Mac can tell something isn’t right the second Jack walks into his room. “What is it?” His voice is quieter than it used to be, like he’s testing whether it’s safe to speak. His hand is tracing over Mickey’s head and ears, the dog is sitting calmly beside Mac’s bed, but there’s an alertness that tells Jack the dog won’t let just anyone near Mac right now. _ He’s got a lot of us protecting him. _

“Mac, your psych eval’s coming up. And...I wanna say, before then, that no matter what happens, no matter what they tell you, you’re never gonna be anything less in my eyes. Okay?”

“I have to pass.” It’s like the kid didn’t hear a thing Jack said. 

“Mac. No one is going to cut you lose because you’re not going back in the field. Matty says she’ll just transfer you to R&D. Hell, you’ll probably be even better at saving the world when you’re making stuff to protect people and make their lives better.” 

“No, you don’t understand,” Mac insists. This sounds more like the old stubborn Mac jack remembers and surprisingly misses. "What I did...I have to make it right," Mac says quietly. "I let him do what he wanted. I let him win, because if I didn’t he’d drug me, or…” His voice trails off. “He got what he wanted no matter what he had to do.” Mickey whines and puts his paws up on the bed, clearly sensing Mac’s rising emotions. 

“Mac, you did what you had to to survive. No one blames you for surviving.” Jack’s not sure whether to feel sick that Mac’s been so badly broken or grateful he didn’t mouth off to Murdoc so much he got his body dumped in a ditch. Maybe it’s both.   
“That’s not what I mean,” Mac says, and there’s a strength in his voice Jack didn’t expect to hear again. “He thought he broke me. And he came pretty damn close. But I knew what I was doing, Jack. I had to make him think he won.” And then Jack gets it. Mac didn’t give Murdoc what he wanted just to survive. _ He manipulated Murdoc into doing what he wanted. He let him think it was safe to bring Mac along with him, to use him to help, because he knew how Murdoc thinks. He played his ego and his blind obsession. _ He was one step ahead of the man who’s always been one step ahead of them all. And he did all that under conditions that should have shattered him completely. 

“I beat him once already, and now, I want to finish it."

"Kid, you're nowhere near field ready. Tell us what we need to know and we'll go after him."

"No. No, I have to do it. I have to look him in the eyes when we find him, and I have to make sure he knows this time, I won." Below the bruises and scars, past the hollowed cheeks and pale skin, Jack can see the fiery determination. _ If this is what helps him heal, the only way he knows how to move on, then I'll be there beside him every step of the way. _ “I’m going to put that monster where he belongs, and I want to see his face when we catch him.” 

Jack tries not to think about how much that sounds like what Mac used to say about finding James. _ And look how that ended. _ But something tells him this won’t be the same. Because Mac will never be the same.

Mac isn’t the same person Jack remembers. But he’s still the same in the ways that matter. He knows Jack will always come for him, and that’s all he needs to know right now. _ We’re a family. And I’m never going to let anyone take my family away again. _

* * *

PHOENIX COUNSELING

WAY MORE STRESSFUL THAN THE NAME IMPLIES

Mac shifts impatiently on the hard plastic chair in the waiting room. It’s the day for his psych eval, and he just wants to be done with it. _ Jack says not to fight for getting put back in the field. To just focus on my progress right now, and be happy with that. _But that’s not good enough. 

He twists a paperclip he found on the floor into the shape of a human head, then drops it on the magazine-covered table beside him. None of the news on any of the papers looks familiar. He’s been away from normal human society for a long time. It all seems alien and trivial. He doesn’t care about who’s marrying who or what the newest diet is. He just cares about making it through this meeting. 

He jitters, tapping one foot rapidly on the floor and knocking a fist against his leg. He thought he’d outgrown those habits as an eight year old, when he started using the paperclip bending to replace them. But maybe it’s something about the head injury that made them come back. At any rate, Jack won’t yell at him like James always did when he did those kind of things. 

He sighs. Today has to go well. Better than well. Because he’s tired of his team, his family, treating him like he’s fragile, like he’s going to break. They’re trying not to, but he sees it in their eyes, hears it in their voices. As long as things are different, they’re going to treat him differently. So he has to make sure everything goes back to normal. 

The door opens, and he jumps a little, but it’s not the office door. It’s the one to the hallway. And Jack is standing in it. He walks in, sits down next to Mac, and hands him a box. 

“Hey kiddo, I got you something.”

Mac opens it slowly, then lifts out a Swiss Army knife. _ That’s the second one he’s gotten for me. _ He doesn’t know what happened to the other one, he had it when he left James, he had it when he was on the streets. Murdoc must have taken it, maybe he still has it, if he’s still alive out there. Mac runs a finger over the cold red grip, then sets the knife back in the box. 

“Jack, I can’t.” Mac pushes the knife away. “I don’t deserve it.”

Jack frowns. “Mac?” 

“I built that bomb for James with my knife. I almost killed Jill. You were right, you were right when you first met me. I shouldn’t be trusted with this.” 

“Mac, there is no one I trust more.” Jack curls Mac’s hand around the handle of the knife. “This belongs to you. And you deserve to have it.” 

Mac’s fingers close on the knife, and he looks up at Jack. And for the first time in a long time, things seem like they just might be okay. Not now, not right away. But someday.


	2. Antony+Cleopatra+Footlights

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So as you may have noticed, this isn't the original 302...I couldn't justify Mac doing an out-of-country mission so soon after the events of last chapter, so I changed things up a little. But I will be doing the Deltas mission this season, just at a later date! I couldn't scrap that one entirely, it's too good.

### 302-Antony+Cleopatra+Footlights

PHOENIX PSYCHOLOGICAL EVALUATIONS

MAC CAN’T AFFORD TO FAIL THIS

Mac forces himself not to wiggle in the chair, under Sam’s steely gaze. He’s already passed the general eval that clears him to be sent home, that assures everyone he’s not going to become self-destructive. _ Murdoc tried to destroy me, there’s no way I would give him the satisfaction of doing it myself. _

But at his insistence, and Matty’s reluctant approval, he’s being moved on to field readiness assessments. And since Sam is the best evaluator they have, he’s stuck with her. He knows Cage prides herself on being detached from what she does; that she can do the kind of interrogations she’s capable of because she leaves her emotions at the door. But he can also see that this time, that’s not the case. _ She watched Jack carry me out of that building. All she can see is how broken I was. _

Her questions are clinical, but he can see the pain that flickers in her eyes when he tells her, unflinchingly, what Murdoc has done to him. About the drugs, the collar, the rape. He can’t afford to let it hurt. He can do that later, in the quiet of his own home. He can break down and cry and scream and be as broken as he feels. But right now, he has to prove he can lock all that pain away and be strong. _ Because that’s what they need from me out there. _

“Mac, clearing you for the field…” He hates the pity in Cage’s voice. “I can’t in good conscience send you back out there. Especially with that maniac on the loose.”

“But that’s exactly _ why _ I need to be back there. I know him better than anyone, I learned how he thinks and who he talks to, I can help catch him.” 

“You can help catch him from the War Room just as easily.” 

“Please.” Mac hates to beg, especially now, but he’s not going to let anyone stop him. “If I quit, it means he won.” He leans across the table, forcing himself not to look away from her steady gaze. “When you didn’t know me, you cleared me for active duty after _ two years _ of the same thing Murdoc put me through. The only difference now is that you know me, and it’s personal.” 

_ But the truth is I’m not the scared, defensive person I was then.I’m stronger. _ If he wasn’t, he’d have given up weeks ago. _ Back then, I had nothing to fight for except the chance to escape that hell I was in. Now, I have everything to fight for. _ He wants his family back, he wants his job back, and he won’t stop until he’s proved he can handle this. 

_ Jack would say I’m fighting so hard because I feel worthless without what I do. _ And maybe some of that is still true. But it’s more than that now. He doesn’t want to learn how it feels to watch the rest of the team go off and risk their lives without him. He doesn’t want to be stuck in the War Room and the offices for the rest of his life, he wants to be with the people he cares about, and who care about him.

Cage sighs. “Medical’s cleared you, all your initial treatments are completed and according to your reports most of the serious side effects of the untreated head trauma have faded. You’re still flagged for persistent intense headaches, but there is precedent for clearing agents with a history of migraines for field work, so I don’t see why this should be an insurmountable problem.” 

She glances at Mac, frowning. “There is the matter of the fine motor movements. I know you’re aware of that.” He is. His hands shake sometimes now. But he can control it. And honestly he’s not sure whether that’s the brain injury or the childhood issues with the same thing. _ The paperclips fixed that once, hopefully it’ll help again. _

“I’m aware. But…” he has an even better argument. “My team knows how to do what I do too. Jack and Riley and Bozer can be my hands if I need them. I know it’s possible to talk someone else through things. Especially if I’m right there with them.” He can’t think about Zoe now. _ And what must Nasha think? Has she ever tried to call me? Does she think I wanted to stop talking to her? _ He should call her. 

_ Damn it, I hate the way I keep getting distracted. _ This used to happen before. But it wasn’t so consuming. Now he just loses his train of thought completely, going off on random rabbit trails. It’s hard to control, but he thinks that if he gets back in the field he’ll be able to focus again. And if he can’t...well, he’ll deal with that when he gets there. That’s just how it works. 

_ If I was alone, then there’s no way I would trust myself out there. _ But he has a team to help him do this job, and that makes all the difference. _ It isn’t just me that goes out there and acts like the hero. It’s all of us together who keep on saving the world. _ He’s had two years to learn how to work with his team, and they’ve had two years to learn how to understand what he does. 

_ I don’t have to be everything, or know everything. _ And finally, finally, that’s sunk in. _ Maybe I had to face James again to understand. _ To realize that that man had lied to him for years, and that the people who really cared were the ones who told him it was okay to make mistakes sometimes. That it’s okay to be human.

He hasn’t been to see James since...everything. He’s not ready for that. Someday he will be. But for now, he can pretend the man never existed. His memory has a few remaining gaps in it, things that might never come back. It’s not too much of a stretch to let it see Jack in a few childhood memories. _ It’s not that I can’t tell the difference between what was real and what my mind is trying to recreate from fragments. _ But he doesn’t need to question the way the dreams and the tiny wisps of memory show Jack’s face sometimes instead of James. _ It can’t turn back time, but maybe what it means is that this is the way to go forward. _

He hasn’t told Jack yet, about that. But he will. When the time is right. But he won’t wait too long. Life is short. 

Sam sighs, standing up and picking up her files. 

“I’ll submit my recommendation that you return to field operations, but the final decision rests solely with Oversight.” 

“Thank you.” Mac reaches for her hand, and she shakes it strongly. She’s well aware of what it’s like to be manipulated and controlled, to be forced to do things you regret. He knows that some part of her understands why he needs this. Because she’s been there too. 

“And Mac?” She says as she opens the door. “For what it’s worth, be careful. We’d hate to lose you again.” 

* * *

JAMESON COMMUNITY THEATER

A GOOD BREAK FROM WORK

“I feel so cultured,” Jack says, tugging at his tie to straighten it. “Watching Shakespeare performed live. Wait, is there etiquette for these things? Like there is at those fancy dinners?”

“Mostly just don’t make noises that disturb the people around you,” Bozer says, flipping through the program he grabbed off a side table. “Wow, I didn’t know Penny’s full name was Penelope.”

“She probably thought it sounded more theatrical,” Riley chuckles. “That sounds like her style.” 

Jack finishes adjusting the knot in his tie and then starts fussing with Mac’s hair. They’ve cut it shorter, gotten rid of the worst of the remaining faded dye Murdoc put in it, but Mac insisted they had to leave it long enough to cover up most of the scars on his neck. He’s wearing a high-collared shirt (but no tie) and he seems distinctly uncomfortable in it. _ Awww kiddo. _ Mac clearly hates the feeling of anything in contact with his neck, but he hates the idea of people seeing the scars even more. 

Jack can’t blame the kid, but he sure as hell can blame the man responsible for leaving those marks on him. _ When we find Murdoc, I’m not coming for him with handcuffs, not this time. I’m coming for him with a bullet. _He’s not going to give that psycho the chance to put his hands on Mac again.

Which is also why, with the lease coming up on his apartment, he’s chosen not to renew it. 

And Jack will be moving into Mac’s house for the foreseeable future. Sure, Matty went through and updated security with a fine-tooth comb, and Riley’s followed her and found any bugs in the network that she could, and Mac will have Mickey, who’s more defensive than ever, but Jack doesn’t want to take chances. 

He’s already discussed it with Mac, once the kid got the green light from his psych eval that he’d be going home. He has two days left of intensive PT before he does the field physical, since he’s still requesting to be returned to field agent status. That doesn’t surprise Jack at all. He’s had several injuries himself that should have been career ending, and he understands the desire to beat the odds. 

When Jack had suggested moving in with Mac, Bozer had immediately agreed. And then, two days later, started talking about potentially moving in with Leanna. When Jack offered to help him get a deal on leasing his old apartment, Bozer was sold on the plan. _ He wasn’t going to change anything if it meant leaving Mac alone, but he trusts me to protect the kid _ . And Jack knows Mac was okay with that; he might even have been the one who encouraged Bozer to go for it. _ He doesn’t like feeling like he’s being a burden, putting Bozer’s life on hold to be looking after him. And Boze knows him well enough to know that’s what’s going through his mind. _Bozer’s still got Leanna to talk to, but he’s already planning how he’s going to change the apartment and make it his. 

“Sorry I’m so late,” Leanna says, hurrying into the lobby and making a beeline for Bozer. “My flight only landed two hours ago, and I still had to get dressed…”

“You look gorgeous,” Bozer says, giving her a quick kiss on the cheek. “And just think, after today, we won’t have to worry about that anymore.” A lot of things are changing, but most notably, Leanna just signed the final papers attaching her permanently to the Phoenix as the CIA liaison. Technically, Matty and Cage were functioning in that capacity already, but with both of them now full-time Phoenix employees, it wasn’t hard to make the case that a CIA agent should be brought in. 

“And you’re not even late, there’s still ten minutes until the curtain rises,” Riley says. “But we probably should go in and get our seats.” 

They’ve reserved them ahead of time, and Jack grins at the sight of the fancy handwriting on the name cards left on the seats. _ Penny never changes. _ The spunky little parole officer with her quirky sense of style and her good-natured heart was an absolute godsend when Mac’s first PO kept giving the kid grief. Jack feels like those days were a lifetime ago. He doesn’t like thinking of them often, doesn’t like remembering that Mac was just as traumatized then as he is now, but that Jack was too callous to see it. _ I hurt him a lot at first, it’s a wonder he ever trusted me at all. _

“You made it!” someone is rushing up the aisle, someone in full ancient Egyptian regalia. According to Penny, this is the first time she’s landed a major role, one of the title ones no less. 

“Well, if it isn’t the future Broadway star herself,” Jack chuckles. “Haven’t seen you in forever, Penny. How’s opening night?” 

“Honestly? I’m super nervous. Like I’m always nervous opening night, but tech week for this one was hell, and one of our lighting crew flaked out on us halfway through, and our Octavius came down with the flu so he’s got an understudy subbing, and I’ve never had a leading role before.” Penny is as animated as ever, talking with her hands and jittering so much Jack is half afraid her headdress is going to fall off. 

“You’re going to absolutely rock it as Cleopatra,” Bozer says. “Trust me. I know a good actress when I meet one.” He grins. “Hey, this costume is giving me an idea. How would you feel about being in a movie about a four-thousand-year-old killer mummy? I’m thinking of calling it ‘The Cairo Curse’.” 

Jack groans. “We don’t…”

“Talk about Cairo,” Riley finishes for him. “But all jokes aside, I’m sure this will be great.” 

“Break a leg,” Mac says, and Penny grins. 

“Okay, I should probably get backstage now,” Penny says. “Gosh I really hope this isn’t a colossal disappointment.”

“I’m sure it won’t be.” Mac grins. “You’ve got this.”

* * *

Mac shifts in his seat, forming a paperclip into the shape of the feather insignia that’s been projected on the stage curtains while they wait for the show to begin. He’s been to more than a few high school plays; Bozer was part of the crew for a lot of them and Mac came out of loyalty more than out of any interest in the shows themselves. 

He’s never seen Shakespeare before, though, even though he had to read a few plays in high school English. Mrs. Wallace, senior year, liked to assign roles, and he’d ended up playing several smaller roles, although he blames his last name for getting him cast as the lead in _ Macbeth _ . He can remember a few lines from that, the only other one he remembers is the final monologue from _ A Midsummer Night’s Dream _, apparently Mrs. Wallace decided he was also perfect to be a mischievous fairy. He can’t really blame her though, everyone knew he was the wrong person in school to start a prank war with. 

He’s getting lost in his own head again when he hears someone whispering his name and shaking his shoulder. Jack, who took the aisle seat next to him, has leaned over, and Penny is right behind him, in the aisle again. 

“Mac?” Penny asks. “You know how I told you that electrician left? We’ve got a problem with the stage left lighting, and the new guy can’t seem to figure out what’s wrong, and he got here late so he just found out something’s messed up.”

“Okay, I’ll take a look.” He jumps up and slides out of the seat, past Jack and into the aisle. Penny leads him through the backstage door and to the stairs to the catwalk where a young guy with frazzled-looking reddish hair is pacing nervously. He looks like he stuck his finger in the lights’ power sockets. 

Penny walks up to him. “Greg? This is Mac. He might be able to help with those lights.”

“I hope so. This is gonna be a disaster if we can’t get those fixed.”

“It’s going to be fine. Mac can fix anything.” _ I sure hope so. _He looks up at the bank of lights, then back at Penny. She’s pale beneath the heavy makeup she’s wearing for the role. He can understand the stress, he saw it in Bozer’s face every time he sent away a script, every time he entered something in a film show. She wants this to go well, to be something she can be proud of rather than something she’ll wish the world never knew she did. 

He glances up at the bank of lights hanging high above the stage. _ Great. That’s gotta be twenty feet. _Heights are only a little less terrifying than Murdoc.

“You okay?” Penny asks. _ Right, she’s really good at spotting when I’m not doing great. _He doesn’t get the chance to answer, because a short man with receding brown hair in a ponytail and large rimless glasses rushes up. 

“What is wrong with the lights?”

“The three covering stage left won’t turn on, so it’s leaving that whole section of the stage black.” Greg sighs. “I changed the bulbs just in case, but I think it’s something with the wiring, and that’s not my area of expertise, I’ve only ever worked the light board, not the mechanics side.”

“We open in three minutes!” The man gasps. 

“Mr. Laroux, we’re gonna fix it. Don’t give yourself an aneurysm.” Penny puts a hand on the man’s shoulder. “This is my friend MacGyver, he’s going to take a look at what’s wrong.” 

“Who is this MacGyver?” he asks. There’s a trace of an accent, probably French. He adjusts his glasses, glancing Mac over with a sharp scrutiny. “Is he a stagehand? Is he trained?”

“He’s an electrical engineer,” Penny deadpans. _ She is a good actress. _ “He works at a think tank here. He’s a researcher.” She twists a strand of her straightened hair. “But if you don’t trust him and let him fix it, we’re going to have to open late. Just trust me.”

Mac looks up at the stairs and swallows. _ I’ve just got to get this over with. _ He starts up the stairs, the metal railing cold under his clenched fingers. He can’t think about this right now, he just has a job to do. But this is the highest he’s been in a long time without something a little firmer than metal grating between him and the ground. There’s a sudden moment of fear that the cables holding it to the roof will snap and the whole thing will go plummeting to the stage.

He takes a deep, shaky breath. _ Get a grip. This is sturdy, people go up and down dozens of times a day. Nothing is going to happen. _ Mac grips the edge of the catwalk firmly. _ Don’t look down. _

He makes his way to the bank of lights, leaning over slightly to see where the wires run to a central electrical box. These lights are old-school, still using incandescent bulbs rather than color shifting LEDs. He remembers how excited Bozer was when the school drama program got a grant for those. It meant replacing three lights, the basic red, green, and blue that are mixed to form other colors, with one light that could be adjusted for any color on the spectrum. But it looks like here, the red, green, and blue filtered lights are all out of commission. So no light at all.

His hands are shaking, probably a combination of stress and that fear of heights that’s trying desperately to take over his brain. He can feel a couple tears burning at the corners of his eyes, but he blinks them away. _ One of the things I hate the most is the way I cry so easily now. _ He takes a deep breath and then starts removing the covers on the lights. 

He can see the problem now. Corrosion on the wiring connections. It looks like there’s a slight leak in the roof, and some water must have gotten on this section of lights. He removes the connections, rubs them as clean as he can, and reattaches them. “Okay, try it now,” he calls down. 

The lights flash on, a white glow from the three combined illuminating stage left. Mac breathes a sigh of relief, hurries back down, and slides into his seat just as the curtain finishes rising. 

If he’d never seen the chaos behind the stage, Mac would never have known it was happening. Everyone onstage seems perfectly immersed in their part, there’s no indication that the show was struggling a few minutes before curtain. Mac feels like that’s a decent description of his own life right now. Behind the scenes, it’s a mess, but he doesn’t show that side. And he’s working on fixing it, with a little help. 

But even that thought disappears in a few minutes. He’s fully absorbed in what’s happening onstage. Penny is phenomenal, she’s taken the role of Cleopatra and made it her own. Even the most emotionally dramatic scenes, which someone else might have acted too flamboyantly, Penny always manages to keep genuine. It never feels like she’s trying too hard to make a scene happen, it always feels natural. Like Cleopatra’s scripted emotion is born from the same passionate nature that decorated a dingy parole office with a tinsel-covered Christmas tree. 

When the curtains finally go down and the cast returns for a final bow, Mac claps until his hands are sore. _ They were all amazing, but Penny stole the show. _

The cast are waiting in the lobby as the audience leaves, shaking hands and talking to family members and friends. When Penny sees Mac, she rushes right over and gives him a massive hug, and he can feel some of the makeup on her face smear across his own cheek. It takes an effort not to flinch and pull away, but he knows she won’t hurt him. It’s just hard to remind his body of that, when the physical contact is so deeply ingrained as dangerous. 

“You were great, Penny.”

“Thank you! It _ felt _ great,” Penny says, grinning as she disengages from the hug. “I didn’t know I had it in me.”

“Well, I did,” Bozer says. “You’re fantastic! We really, really need to discuss that Cairo script. Can I get your phone number? For purely professional reasons. I’m already dating. Um, actually, this is my girlfriend. Leanna.” 

“It’s nice to meet you, Leanna.” Penny shakes her hand. “You’ve got a good guy there. He’s always been a fantastic friend to Mac, since I’ve known them.”

“He’s great.” Leanna grins. 

“Well, we really ought to be going,” Jack says. “Let everyone else congratulate the star.”

“You don’t have to leave yet, everyone wants Mac to come to the cast party.” Penny grins. 

“Oh, I couldn’t.” Mac says, disengaging from Penny’s second overzealous hug of the night. 

“Come on, you’re basically honorary crew by now. Everyone’s grateful you fixed those lights.” Mac glances at Jack and the others, and Penny must notice that he’s uncomfortable at the thought of being in a crowded room with mostly strangers, without his friends there. “They’re welcome to come too, we have plenty of cake.”

“Well, how could I say no to cake?” Jack asks with a chuckle. 

“I guess that means we’re coming,” Mac says. _ I’ll be fine, I can handle a little socializing. Besides, I have to start getting used to it again somehow _. 

Bozer can’t pass up the thought of getting to mingle with a few more people in the show business, and trying to pitch his script as a play version of itself. And Leanna insists she wants to come with him rather than go home, that she slept on her flight. Riley and Jack both seem like they don’t actually want to leave Mac’s side. 

After about twenty minutes, the last of the audience has left, and Penny pulls Mac through the doors to a big backstage room that has racks of scenery along one wall, and stairs to an attic and a basement in the corner. The middle area has been cleaned, and there’s a huge table set up, piled with veggie and cold meat and cheese trays. A massive cake on the end is decorated with the name of the play and a tiny border of pyramids around the edge. 

“Dig in,” Penny says. “Our sound specialist Tony bakes for all these things and his cakes are to die for.” 

She introduces the cast and crew in a whirlwind of names and faces. Mac figures he’ll probably remember about a third of them. He thinks he’s seen Emma, a tall brunette who played Octavia, at the bakery where he and Jack get breakfast, and Luca, who played a soldier, works at Weathers’s now. 

Jack and Riley are filling plates, and Mac grabs one of his own. He suddenly realizes he’s hungry. Really hungry. Six weeks of eating the bland food in Medical has kind of lost what tiny amount of appeal it had to begin with. A couple more days, though, and he gets to go home. Except instead of Bozer cooking for him, it’ll be Jack. The thought is bittersweet. He’s spent a good chunk of his life with Boze, he’ll miss his old roommate. But the thought of waking up in the morning to Jack making breakfast feels like maybe he really did get a chance to turn back the clock and steal back a little of the childhood that was stolen from him. 

Penny is leaning on the wall, digging into a piece of cake and poking her fiance with her fork. Mac vaguely recognizes him from last year’s Halloween party. Now he’s wearing a paint-stained t-shirt instead of a blazer with a Superman costume underneath it, and the glasses are gone. “Hi, it’s nice to meet you again...Mark?” Mac asks, walking over. 

“You to. Mac, right?” The guy’s got a strong grip and a wide grin. “Penny did great out there, didn’t she?”

“Amazing.” 

“I have to admit, I got a little jealous watching Ryan,” he points to the “Antony” scooping a liberal helping of ranch dip onto his plate, “flirting with my fiance,” Mark says with a chuckle. “But that just means she’s got real talent.”

“Oh stop it. I’m just an amateur. I’m a parole officer.”

“Yes, but you were born for the stage,” Mr. Laroux says with a smile, walking up. Mac saw his name in the program, he’s the director and producer. “You blew them all away. Your Cleopatra was..._ magnifique! _” He laughs. “So powerful. So emotional. You know, some say she is the strongest woman Shakespeare ever created.

“Well, then, it suits my Penny perfectly,” Mark says with a chuckle. “I, meanwhile, am content to be a member of the scenery crew.”

“And our PR man,” “Antony” says. “You know, we can’t thank you enough for writing the advertisement copy for the papers.”

“What can I say. Once an entertainment reporter, always an entertainment reporter.” Mark shrugs. “Trust me, it was a nice relief to write about something other than real-life murders.” He grins. “And Mom had a field day making the costumes. She hasn’t had that much fun in years.” 

Mac smiles. Theater family is a lot like his little agency family. All working together, using their skill sets and the random things they can do to make the whole thing come together.

“Hey, Ryan, is that sword supposed to be in two pieces like that?” Penny asks, shaking her head.

“Um, not really. I must have broken it when I fell into your arms in that last scene. Damn it, I was doing so well not breaking it in the fight scenes.” He sighs. “Well, I guess we’ll have to put this one in the vise with some glue. And I’ll grab another one to put with my costume.”

“I’ll get it,” Emma says quickly. Clearly Antony’s stage wife has a real life crush on him; she’s been looking for a chance to talk to him all evening. She’s gone before anyone can say anything. 

Riley walks up, her plate piled high with crackers and cheese. “Mac, you need to fix random stuff more often. This is great.” 

Mac is about to reply when a piercing shriek cuts through the air. Everyone turns and looks toward the door that leads into the rest of the backstage rooms, and then the sound comes again. Hysterical, panicked, and horrified. 

Those screams can’t mean anything good. Mac rushes toward the backstage area, and he can hear footsteps behind him too. He recognizes the cadence of Jack’s steps, and the sound of Riley running in high heels. 

There are no more screams, but there is a low moaning sound, and gasps like someone is sobbing. Mac follows the sound to the door that’s marked ‘props’, and pushes it open, almost stumbling over the kneeling figure on the floor. 

Emma is bent over next to a prop trunk, and from the sound of it she’s throwing up. Mac glances into the trunk, and immediately sees why. There’s a dismembered body inside, eyes staring sightlessly at the ceiling. And that’s not a prop. He feels sick at the sight and smell of blood himself. 

“Get back. Everyone move back.” Jack is already taking charge of the situation. “Don’t touch anything, but don’t leave the room either.” He’s crouching down, studying the edge of the trunk. 

“Listen to him. He’s a lawyer,” Penny says. “Someone call 911.”

“No one leaves this building until the cops get here.” Jack stands up, putting on what Mac recognizes as his best ‘Roger Preston’ face. “Because as of right now, everyone here is going to be a suspect.”

* * *

Mac really, really hates having to talk to the police. Even though he knows there are several people who will vouch for his whereabouts at the time the body was found, he’s still terrified that somehow they’re going to look at his past and decide he’s the perfect suspect to pin a murder on. He’s overwhelmingly relieved when the officer interviewing him simply tells him not to leave town for a while, then gives him a nod out the door of the dressing room that’s been hastily converted to an interview room. 

Mac stops at the small bathroom in the hall to wash his face and calm his shaky hands, twisting two paperclips into a set of the caricature greek tragedy/comedy masks and leaving the little sculpture on the counter by the sink. He glances in the mirror, and even though most of the traces of captivity have faded, there are still faint dark circles, his features are too sharp, and he has two new visible scars, one on his left cheekbone and the other crossing the bridge of his nose. He takes a deep breath, his vision swimming slightly. _ It’s just the stress. Breathe. It’ll pass. _

_ I know I didn’t do anything but still every time I sit down with an officer it terrifies me. _ He has a record, and that immediately makes him look bad to them. 

He knows getting nervous doesn’t help him look innocent, but he can’t help it. He’s just so afraid of what happens if he ever gets sent back to prison. Those memories, at least, came back brutally clear. _ Why couldn’t I have lost that, instead of chunks of my childhood? _ Then again, that wasn’t such a great time either.

Once he feels like he’s not going to pass out, he joins Jack, Riley, Bozer, and Leanna in the lobby of the theater. Penny is with them, her thick mascara has smeared and she looks pale, but she also seems to be holding up well, considering. Then again, she’s not the one who has to constantly think she’s the one in trouble every time she sees a police uniform. 

“You okay, kiddo?” Jack asks when Mac walks up. Mac just nods, but Jack visibly relaxes when he does, even calming down enough to make another dumb joke. “It’s past your bedtime. We better get you back where you belong.” _ Right, back to medical. _ Mac hopes he doesn’t have another nightmare. They were just getting through the night without him waking up screaming. But the interrogation is going to be hovering there in his mind…

Apparently he’s not the only shaken one. Jack still looks worried. He keeps glancing toward the stage, and there’s a frown cutting deeply into his forehead. Mac knows that worried frown must have been almost permanent while he was gone, there’s a line furrowed into Jack’s face that follows its track. 

“Jack, what is it?” Riley asks._ She noticed too. _

“Probably nothin’.” Jack says, looking toward Penny meaningfully. “Not important.”

“If it wasn’t important you wouldn’t look worried,” Penny says. “And I already know something isn’t right about that body. I saw his face...well, as well as I could see it. And he wasn’t anyone who’d ever been part of the cast or crew. He could have been in the audience, but I don’t know how he would have gotten backstage. You need keys to get through those doors. Unless someone let him in.”

“Well, wherever he was killed, it wasn’t in that room.” Jack says. “The scene was too clean.”

“Clean? That was a bloodbath!” Bozer says. “Even I don’t do that kind of gruesome.” 

“Well, honestly, Bozer, for what it could have been...there wasn’t a lot of blood there. A little smear on the edges of the trunk. But...not the kind of mess there ought to have been, given what we saw in there, and what was inside, on the body.” Jack sighs. “Someone killed that guy somewhere else, put him in that trunk, then brought the body here.”

“But why would they go to all that trouble?” Bozer asks. “Wouldn’t it have been easier to just dispose of the body somewhere no one would find it for a while?”

“It would. Unless they wanted to send a message to someone.” Riley says. “Maybe there’s some reason someone would want to prove this guy was dead.”

“So you think someone killed this man, brought his body to the theater, and hid it in the prop room hoping the right person would stumble on it?” Bozer frowns. “That sounds…”

“Pretty theatrical?” Penny asks, laughing a little bitterly. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we’re surrounded by very dramatic types.” 

“Well, it’s not like there’s anything we can really do about it,” Jack says. Mac knows he’s trying to maintain their covers, but there’s also the very real honesty that this is an LAPD investigation, not a Phoenix op. This isn’t their job. “That said, I’ve got friends, I’m gonna pull a few strings, and see if we can’t give them a little assist on this one.” Jack puts a hand on Penny’s shoulder. “You’ve been good to the kid, and I’d like to return the favor. Just watch your back till they catch who’s part of this. Okay?” She nods. 

Jack turns to the door. “Alright, guys, let’s go.” 

* * *

THE WAR ROOM

IT’S TOO EARLY FOR THIS

Riley sets down her cup of coffee and turns back to her rig. “Thanks, Jack.”

“Hey, when you call and say you need me to make you Mama’s famous Mexican Hot Chocolate Coffee, I deliver.” He grins. “Took me a while to find the chili powder in Mac’s house, though. He had it in the garage.”

Mac chooses that minute to walk in, wearing a shirt that’s quite obviously Jack’s over the plain blue scrubs. He probably didn’t bother to sign out of medical. Riley sighs. “What about my house?”

“The chili powder was in the garage, dude.”

“Um...before I...before everything, I was working on improving my tear gas mixtures.”

“Okay, when you come home we are gonna establish some ground rules. Bozer let you get away with a lotta stuff, but when it comes to Jack Dalton, well…” He grins. “Old Army habits die hard.”

“If you wake me up at six by marching in and playing ‘reveille’ on your phone I am going to put a pillow over my head and ignore you.” 

Jack shakes his head, chuckling. “Nah, dude, I’m talking more the ‘put things back where they frickin’ belong so you can find ‘em the next time you want ‘em’.”

“I _ can _ find things in my own house, Jack.” Mac smirks, reaching for a paperclip from the bowl on the table. 

“Okay, then how ‘bout this, so _ Jack _ can find ‘em?”

“Okay.” Mac grins, tosses Jack a paperclip bent in the shape of a chili pepper, and then turns to Riley. She’s glad he seems so cheerful this morning, that was something she was afraid he might never get back. He’d been so quiet and still and sad-looking in that bed in medical. But maybe passing his psych eval has something to do with it. She knows he’s on track to pass his physical too, and he’s probably glad to be getting back into the way things were. _ He’s working hard to pretend nothing changed. _

“Okay, people, settle down,” Matty says, walking in with Bozer, Leanna, and Cage following her. “Mac, as glad as I am to see you back in the War Room, throwing things is _ not _ acceptable. Not even at Jack.” She rolls her eyes. “Or I would have sent a few office supplies in his direction by now.”

“Aw, c’mon Matty, you know you love me.”

“Don’t push me, Dalton.” Matty shakes her head. “Okay Riley, where are we at on what happened at the theater last night? I swear I can’t let you people out by yourselves.” 

“The victim was Johnnie Sheng, a businessman who’s been suspected of transporting pirated software into the US in his tech firm’s shipments.” Riley’s backdoor into the LAPD has come in handy more than once. She has their whole file on the case so far. 

“Does that give us a reason to sweep this one out from the LAPD?” Jack asks. 

Matty shakes her head. “No. Officially, Phoenix won’t be able to do anything with this case unless it ties into one of our open investigations. So far, our only connection to Sheng is Penny, and we can’t exactly advertise that she’s a friend of a covert government operative.”

“And no one at the theater is connected to him?” Leanna asks. 

“Not on the surface. But I’m going to dig a little deeper and see what turns up.” Riley shrugs. “Just because it’s not our case doesn’t mean I don’t have a little personal leeway. And access to his business records.”

“Don’t tell me things I don’t want to know,” Matty says, but she’s smiling a little. “I’d like to keep _ some _plausible deniability.”

Riley continues to sip her chocolatey, spicy coffee and hunt through the paper trails. She passes anything remotely interesting off to Leanna, who apparently spent a semester studying forensic accounting in college and passed at the the top of her class. But unfortunately, none of the data is throwing the kind of red flags they wish it was. 

Riley sets her rig aside and rubs at her eyes. “Well, whatever he was doing, he hid it well. And aside from, you know, the whole getting stabbed and tossed in a prop trunk thing, he looks like any other businessman.” 

Leanna glances through the printouts of financial records. “There’s a few shady things happening in the stock trading side, but import-export looks clear as far as I can see. And he’s pretty generous, he’s got at least eight charities and local organizations that get sizable endowments from his company on a regular basis.” 

“So if he’s dealing under the table…” Mac starts.

“It’s very under the table. He must have seperate accounts and records for his illegal side business.” Riley sighs. “I’m going to keep digging, but without access to his personal computer and records, I’m probably going to be hitting a lot of dead ends. And because he was so cautious about his buyers, it’s going to be hard to find someone to work backward from.” She sighs, closing her rig. _ I hate working cases that we’re not actually supposed to have. _ It just makes everything that much harder. But she isn’t about to give up. _ Penny got Mac out of a lot of trouble, I can’t think of many other people who would have been as forgiving of all the craziness that went with being his parole officer. _

“Guys, I have a theory.” Leanna says. “What if whoever killed him didn’t hide his body because they wanted to, but because they had to?” 

“I’d like to hear this. Go on,” Matty says. 

“Maybe someone in the cast or crew was his partner. And maybe things got a little heated, and they killed him in a fit of rage. But they knew that if they bailed on the show to hide the body, they’d lose any chance of an alibi. So they did the only thing they could think of at the time. Hid the body hoping it _ wouldn’t _be found. Because if that sword hadn’t needed to be replaced, no one would have gone poking around the extra props that night.” 

“It makes sense.” Matty frowns. “Sheng had a reputation for double-crossing his street-level dealers, and for bailing on them at the least sign that they might be noticed by the police. He was insanely careful, and that’s why he hasn’t been caught. Until now.” 

Sam nods. “It’s far more likely than someone hiding the body to send a message. It would have been far easier to just leave the head.” She stops, probably realizing that everyone else in the room is now staring at her. “Guys. Has no one, like, seen _ The Godfather? _”

“That was a horse, Sam,” Bozer says weakly.

“Same idea. But, my point is, that body sounds like it was crammed into the trunk to try and fit it inside. Far more like an attempt to hide a body than an attempt to provide proof of death.” Sam shrugs. 

“She hasn’t gotten less weird,” Mac whispers, and Riley stifles a giggle. Sometimes Sam just...descends into full analytical mode, or former assassin mode, and says the weirdest things totally deadpan. The truth is, that isn’t even the creepiest thing Riley’s heard her former roommate say in a completely serious way. _ I’m afraid of like half the things in my apartment now because she would casually tell me how she could kill someone with it. _ She thinks Sam was trying to be helpful and instructive. It was about the opposite. 

Jack breaks the awkward silence. “Then that leaves us with a pretty definite suspect pool. If someone killed him and tried to hide the body backstage, it had to be a member of cast or crew. Penny says they’re the only ones who can get back there.” 

Mac nods. “Let’s see if Penny can get us a full list of everyone who has a key; it wasn’t necessarily someone who was part of the official roster last night. These people aren’t professional actors, they have all kinds of day jobs. Maybe one of them works in software or programming, or electronics sales, there might be a connection to Sheng there.”

“Well, whoever it is must be a hell of a good actor,” Jack says. “Because they’re covering up a murder.” 

* * *

Bozer stops Leanna out in the hall when he sees her leave Oversight’s office. She’s been in there all morning, or at least that’s what it feels like. “Do you want to grab lunch? Or are you going to be too busy...doing whatever it is you do as a liaison? Liaising?” 

“I’m not too busy for lunch,” Leanna says with a chuckle. “Where did you have in mind?”

“An old favorite.”

When they walk into Tony’s, Bozer sees the man himself behind the counter. “Hey Tony, long time, man!” The place still looks almost the same, except that the pictures of the local sports teams on the walls have different faces, and Tony’s got more grey hairs in his mustache. 

“Wilt Bozer!” Tony hurries out, wiping his hands on his apron and pulling Bozer into a hug. Bozer chuckles. “How you doin’, man?”

“I’m doing great. Tony, this is my girlfriend. Leanna Martin.”

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Leanna.” Tony shakes her hand enthusiastically. “Now what can I get you two lovebirds?”

“One order of your lunch special,” Bozer says, “and Leanna?”

“Um...let’s make it two of those.” She grins. “And a chocolate milkshake for me, and a banana peanut butter for Bozer.”

“Hey, how did you know what kind of milkshake I like?” Bozer asks. 

“Because you tried to make one in the spy school campus kitchen blender once.” Leanna chuckles. “It was all over the counter and the walls and the cupboards.”

“You saw that?” Bozer shakes his head. “And you still agreed to date me?”

Of course. Come on.” She pulls him to a booth seat. “I’m starving.”

“Well, a Tony’s special will take care of that.” Bozer chuckles. “This was my first real job. Spent a lot of hours behind that counter flipping burgers and making milkshakes.”

“You ever regret changing jobs?” Leanna asks.

“Not for a minute.” Bozer reaches for her hand. “Because if it wasn’t for my job, I wouldn’t have met you, and I can’t imagine what that would even be like.” 

When the food arrives, both of them dig in hungrily, and it’s not till she’s halfway through with her burger that the conversation begins again. 

“This is amazing,” Leanna says around a bite of the Tony’s Special. “This is easily the best burger I’ve ever had. Well, aside from yours.” 

“Well, Tony taught me how to _ make _ mine, so the credit there goes to him too,” Bozer chuckles. 

“I’ve missed good food,” Leanna says. “We weren’t really given a lot of personal time at the CIA offices. Most days I just ate in the cafeteria in the building. And their food sucked. Frozen chicken patties and wilted spinach salad.” She shudders. “And I always got home so late and so tired I never felt like making my own food to take with me.” 

“So, now that you’re going to be living in L.A…” Bozer says. “I could make sure you never need to think about buying cafeteria food again.” 

Leanna looks up from where she’s been making the straw wrapper from her milkshake crawl across the table with condensation drops from her glass. “Is this going where I think it’s going? Because I’ve heard rumors that you’re buying Jack’s old place, and that you have plans.”

Bozer sighs. He was really hoping to surprise her. _ That’s disappointing. But also not surprising. _An intelligence gathering secret agency tends to be the worst place to keep secrets. “You heard?”

“Bozer, I’m a _ spy. _ And besides, Riley told me.”

“She did?”

“I think I’m becoming the sister she never had. And Sam is giving me all kinds of weird psychological relationship advice. Everyone here has just adopted me.” Leanna smiles, twisting the corner of her napkin.

“They have a way of doing that. It’s like...it’s like family.” Bozer is glad for that. He and Mac both needed that kind of stability. _ It’s the family that we don’t have. _ He doesn’t let himself think about Mac’s blood relative in a cell in the basement. “So, what’s the verdict? Thanks to Riley, you’ve had time to think about it.”

Her face isn’t beaming, and that sends a chill through Bozer’s stomach that has nothing to do with the massive swallow of milkshake he just took. She stares down at the table, still twisting her napkin. “I...everything is happening so fast, Bozer. I’m not sure how ready I am for that. Yet. Riley and Sam both said they have space for me if that’s what I want to do right now, so it’s not like I’ll have to have my feet under me right away.”

“I understand.”

“It’s not that I’m not in love with you, Bozer. But I’m just worried that...I just want to make sure we’re going to last before someone’s heart gets broken.” 

He nods. It’s smart, they’re just starting out together for real. But still, it hurts. He picks up the bill. “I’ll get this.” And if Tony sees the crestfallen look on Bozer’s face, he’s kind enough not to mention it. 

Bozer heads back to the table. “We should probably get back to work.”

Leanna nods, and they walk out to the car. Bozer can feel his feet dragging. _ Well, that didn’t go as planned. But then again, when does anything in my life work out the way I imagine it? _

* * *

JACK’S APARTMENT

NOT FOR MUCH LONGER

Jack just has to pick up the last few bare essentials from his apartment. Living there the past couple days has felt like camping out. The place doesn’t feel like home anymore. But Mac’s house sure will. He just has to grab his duffel bag and his last box, and then he’s going to pick Mac up from his field physical and they can go home. _ He’ll pass, I know he will. _ It’s going to be weird having the team back together again. Good weird, but still, he’s going to be on high alert every time Mac is with them in the field. _ I’m never letting that kid outta my sight again. _ He almost managed to convince Mac to get a tracker implanted. That was a little too extreme for the kid, and Jack understood completely once Mac told him about that freaky collar and how Murdoc acted like he owned Mac. _ But he did agree that we could put one in his new watch. _Mac has a faint scar on his left wrist from where he must have pulled against some of Murdoc’s restraints, and a watch band covers that up well. 

He’s not wearing Jack’s dog tags again, but they’re tucked with his pocketknife in the drawer of his tiny bedside table. _ Damn Murdoc for stealing another thing that comforted him. _ Jack knows Mac used the dogtags almost as a security blanket, a reminder that someone cared about him, valued him, and believed in him. Even if the kid can just bring himself to carry them around in his pocket, hopefully they’ll still mean good things, not bad ones. 

Jack isn’t at all surprised to see Bozer when he opens his door. The two of them have been working together moving into each others’ places, it made more sense than each of them taking an empty car one trip. Jack would run a load of his things over to Mac’s house, pick up a few of Bozer’s boxes, and bring them back with him. And Bozer would do the same when he had some free time. 

The past few days, Bozer’s been cheerfully arranging the apartment to suit his own eclectic style. The indie movie posters on the walls have replaced Telly Savalas and the vintage Star Wars memorabilia, the fridge is full of actually edible food that doesn’t have a trace of mold on it, and the bathroom has the toilet paper roll put on so that the end is under instead of over the top. That’s probably the thing that’s given Jack the most confusion out of any of this. _ It’s really freakin’ annoying when you wake up at three am and don’t bother to turn on the lights because you know your way around your own apartment. _

But today, Bozer isn’t blasting hip hop on the stereo (Jack let him keep it, Mac’s got the ‘sad excuse for a boom box’ and Jack has a sentimental attachment to that thing now) and being a tiny tornado of home decor. He’s just...sitting on the couch with a stack of unpacked boxes in front of him, staring into nothing. 

“Hey, Boze, what’s wrong? You find cockroaches under the sink?”

“No. Wish that was all it was.” Bozer sighs, leaning back and looking up at Jack. “Leanna wants to put things on hold for a while. She’s not ready to move in yet.”

Jack sighs. He was afraid something like this would happen, that Bozer’s impetuous, intensely devoted nature had gotten ahead of Leanna’s more cautious personality. “Well, you’ve only known each other a year. Boze, when you throw yourself into something, you just dive right in, no fear, no regrets. But not everyone is like that.” There are a rare few people in the world like that, and he can’t believe that after all the pain in his life, Bozer is still one of them. 

“It’s not just that. She...acts like she’s not sure we’re permanent.” Bozer flips a saucepan lid over and over in his hands. 

Jack sighs. “Look, she’s not wrong. Relationships between agents can be dicey. There’s not a lot of time to be together sometimes. Ops take you away more than you’re home, and it can put a strain on even the best matched couple. That’s why Sarah and I never got serious.” He sighs. “And you know, there are days I regret that. But there are a lot more days where I know it was the right choice for both of us.” 

“I could quit the Phoenix, I could do...I could work at a restaurant again, I could go back to making prosthetics and start pitching scripts again, I could do stand up comedy, I could…”

“Bozer, Slow down, man. No one said that’s the only way a relationship with agents has to end. I mean, look at Ty and Kerri Graves in exfil. They’re not even on the same _ team _ and they make it work.” 

Bozer nods slightly, but Jack can still see the tears glinting in his eyes. “Hey, man. It’s okay. I get it. Relationships are tough and it’s so easy to mess ‘em up.” He only just got Diane back, even though they haven’t been able to find the time to go out together since Mac disappeared. She knows the truth, and she understands. _ She hasn’t seen much of Riley either. But she’s willing to give us both some leash. _“But that doesn’t mean they aren’t worth it.”

* * *

MAC’S HOUSE

NOW MAC AND JACK’S HOUSE

Jack pushes open the door, letting Mac walk in with Mickey before he pulls it shut behind them. “Hey, I think it’s a good day to celebrate that you’re finally back in your own house and not Phoenix Medical.” He moves toward the kitchen. “I put some ice cream in here, Rocky Road for you and cookie dough for me.”

“I just passed my physical, I don’t need to eat a bunch of sugar and fat right now,” Mac says with a tiny grin. 

“Yeah, you passed. Which means they aren't gonna go poking and prodding for a while, so you can eat whatever you want and be good later.”

“Is that your theory, old man?” Mac asks. “Because I’ll be sure and remind you of that when they tell you all your arteries are clogged.”

“Hey, I will have you know, I eat healthy...more often than I don’t. I’m careful, I ain’t gonna go croaking on you and Ri. But sometimes you just gotta have a little fun.” Jack grabs the cartons out of the freezer. “And I never said you had to eat the whole quart.” 

Mac doesn’t respond, and Jack sets down the ice cream on the counter, leaving hot water running into a mug for the scoop. He walks out into the living room. 

“Hey kiddo, you okay?”

Mac nods. He’s moving slowly through the house, fingers brushing countertops and furniture. “It feels weird,” he says after a few minutes. “That it’s mine.” Jack shivers. _ Murdoc took away any autonomy he had. Nothing was his, not even his own body. And sometimes, thanks to those drugs, not even his own mind. _

“Yeah, it is. And it’s up to you what you wanna do. So if you don’t want ice cream…”

“No, that sounds great.” Mac says, sitting down on the couch, wrapping himself in a blanket hanging over the back of it, and patting the seat for Mickey to jump up. Jack has to admit he has ulterior motives for wanting to get some calories into the kid. Mac is still so skinny, and he’s cold all the time. _ Never had much meat on his bones, but he couldn’t afford to lose any of it. _ PT has gotten back some of the muscle mass, but the kid doesn’t have any insulation. Jack always argues that _ his _ is his plan B for surviving Arctic conditions, every time he gets a sidelong glance in medical. _ I’m not overweight. Just...got a little padding. _

“I’m in the mood for an Indiana Jones marathon,” Mac says with a small grin. “Did you bring your collection?”

“You think I would leave Bozer my remastered anniversary collection Indiana Jones movies?” Jack says, shaking his head. “They’re right up front next to the TV in the place of honor they deserve. Put in _ Raiders _. You want me to make some chili?”

“That sounds great.” 

They make it through _ Raiders of the Lost Ark _ and about two thirds of _ Last Crusade _(Those two are Mac’s favorites) before Mac starts yawning. Jack guesses the physical today probably took a lot out of him. 

“You ready for bed, kiddo?” Mac nods. Jack leaves him to get ready, but he can’t bring himself to go to bed without checking on the kid._ I really am turning into a parent. _He’s never been this protective, not even with Riley. Then again, no psychopaths kidnapped Riley and tortured her for three months.

Mac is curled up in a tiny ball under his blankets, Mickey laying across his legs. Jack leans on the door. “Goodnight, kiddo.” 

“Can you...stay? For a little?” Mac asks quietly, voice muffled by the multiple layers of cloth over him. 

“Of course, kiddo. I live here now, remember?” Jack sits down on the edge of the bed. “I can stay here all night if it makes you feel better.” 

“I don’t want to…”

“To what? Deprive me of my beauty sleep? We both know it’s too late for that to help,” Jack says with a weak chuckle. 

“Can we sleep on the deck?” Mac whispers, after a few minutes of silence. “It feels safer.” Jack has no idea why. He can’t shake the thought of Murdoc prowling around in those trees, watching them. But he isn’t about to deny the kid any vestige of safety he can get. 

“Yeah, of course. Grab a pillow and a sleeping bag or something, and I’ll get mine.” Jack hurries into his room and grabs his things, also tucking his gun under his arm. He’s not about to be caught unprepared. _ I’m sure that psycho wasn’t done tormenting Mac, and he’d jump at the chance to get his hands on the kid again. _When he walks out on the deck, he sees that Mac has unrolled his sleeping bag in a spot that doesn’t allow for a clear vantage point from the surrounding area. Jack spreads his next to the kid, then crawls in. 

Mac takes a little longer to settle in, mostly because Mickey is trying to steal his pillow. But finally he’s curled up next to Jack, one arm out from under the edge of the sleeping bag and resting on Jack’s. Like he’s reassuring himself he’s not alone. 

Jack takes a deep breath. He can smell the ash from the firepit and the fresh split wood stacked up ready for use. There’s the faint acrid tang of exhaust smoke and smog from the city, a breath of salty air from the ocean, and the rich earthy smell of the woods surrounding them. This feels as familiar as the Dalton ranch, even though Jack’s only been coming to this place for a few years now. _ This is home. Wherever my family is, that’s home. _

“He kept me in a dark room when he left,” Mac says softly, so quietly Jack almost misses it. “It was some kind of cellar. It was so dark, I couldn’t see anything inside. And it was cold and there wasn’t any breeze. It felt dead. I felt like he’d buried me alive.”

Jack shudders. One of his own nightmares is of watching dirt shoveled over his face while he screams and beats on unyielding glass. It’s twisted and creepy, but it’s never _ actually _ happened to him. But this...he can’t imagine how much worse Mac’s nightmares must be. 

“He’s never gonna get to do that to you again, kiddo. He’s never gonna get to lay a finger on you, so help me.” 

“I’m not as scared of him...as I thought I would be.” Mac says. “I just feel numb. Like, I’m scared in my dreams, but when I wake up...he’s already done his worst, what else can he do besides kill me? And he doesn’t want to do that, or he would have already.”

Jack wants to sob. Mac’s voice is so dull and matter-of-fact. _ This is probably his survival mechanism. Probably how he kept himself from losing it when he was in prison, when he was trapped with Murdoc. _Jack hates the thought that this poor innocent kid has had a life where the way he hangs onto his sanity is telling himself that he’s already as damaged as he can get, so what’s a little more?

“Well, I’ll tell you what. I am scared as _ hell _ that he’s gonna find you again. And I’m not gonna let that happen.” Jack says gently. “What’s the world coming to, when a skinny hamburger kid is braver than Jack Dalton?” 

“You’re not a coward, you’re just being my dad.” There’s nothing hesitant in that voice at all. Just a plain confidence in Jack and his role. _ But I failed at that, kiddo. I let that monster take you and hurt you and use you. And that’s on me. _ Jack rolls over and stares up at the stars. _ And so help me, I’m not gonna fail you again. _

* * *

WAR ROOM

WAY TOO LATE FOR ANY SANE PERSON TO BE HERE

Riley sits in the dim night-shift lighting, still poring over the documents she requested from Penny. Penny still thinks she and Jack are a lawyer team, and Riley explained her request saying Jack thinks the murder might be tied to another case he tried years ago. It wasn’t the best excuse, but she thinks Penny bought it. 

The cast list turned up a few possibilities, but without legal permission to investigate, Riley can’t interrogate them, or go digging too far into their financials. It was different when all she was doing was poking around a dead guy’s stuff, it’s all already part of the LAPD case file anyway. Live people tend to have issues with things like that. 

She’s even hacked the neighborhood security feeds to see if there’s anything that tells her who the killer might be. But she’s coming up dry, and it must show on her face when patty walks in. She’s overseeing two separate ops hitting terror cells in Bangladesh and Saudi Arabia, and she looks exhausted. Riley hates to be the one to give more bad news. 

“Have you found anything yet?” Patty asks. 

“There’s no security cameras anywhere in the backstage area aside from outside the doors. Which only tells us that Sheng entered the building approximately half an hour before the show began. And he never left, so he was killed inside. That fits with what we know about the need to hide a body. Without full approval, I can’t do much more than this without getting us in some very murky legal waters.” She opens a file and dumps in what she knows about the three cast and crew members who might be in on Sheng’s take. It’s a start, but a small one. Still, she’s worked with less. 

Patty sighs. “I’m pulling strings, but it seems like Johnnie was small-time. Too small-time for any agencies to be interested in dealing with his case. They have bigger fish to fry. His only crime is selling knock off computer components and pirating the hottest new video games.”

“Well, it was big enough that someone wanted to kill him for it.”

“Counterfeit components are still lucrative, especially if they’re being used to replace the real ones and the real ones are sold on the black market. And depending on what software he’s pirating, it can be worth millions. Sometimes he gets access to a new game before it even hits the market.” Riley nods. 

She’s met hackers who make it their full time job to leak hot new games before they’re sent into production. _ They post the stolen software and even though it’s usually taken down fast, lots of people still manage to download it. _ Companies have been getting smarter about building in theft failsafes now, but there’s still loopholes. And someone making as much money from it as Sheng could probably pay off a few inside men. _ So he’s making a lot of money, but because it’s not a direct threat to national security, our hands are tied. _

Sometimes she really hates the rules she has to work under now. She’s spent more time working for the system than against it, by now, but there are days she misses the freedom of her black hat past. The ability to disregard the legal thing to do the right thing. 

But it’s not as if there’s much she can do even in an illegal way. The police have seized all of Johnnie’s tech as evidence. 

And then it hits her like a bolt of lightning. _ Johnnie was making a profit pirating video games. My old hacker circle would have something to say about that. _She knows a few who would have been interested in getting a finger in the pie, and a lot more who would say that the whole point of hacker ethics was sticking it to the multimillion dollar corporations by offering their games for free. Somewhere out there, from one or both of those camps, there might be chatter and there might be a back door into something Johnnie was into. 

“I know that look,” Patty says suddenly, pulling Riley out of her thoughts. “You have something.” 

“Patty, you might not want to ask me how I’m going to find out what I’m...about to find out.”

“You’re right. I don’t. Just do it, and tell me when you find what you’re looking for.” Patty turns and walks out, headed back to her office, most likely. Riley can’t imagine how the woman juggles everything that happens at this agency. She knows she wouldn’t want that job. She’s still typing away when Patty walks back in, and when she looks up at the clock it’s a shock to realize two hours have passed.

“Both our teams have completed their objectives and been picked up by exfil.” Riley lets out a small relieved sigh, she doesn’t know all their operatives personally but the truth is, it could be any one of them on the days she hears that there was a casualty. _ We all risk our lives every day. Because of what we believe in. _ “It doesn’t look like you’re ready to leave yet, though.”

Riley nods. “Okay, so, rumor has it Johnnie was about to do something big. That he was saying everything until now was just a game. That whatever this was was real. And that it was going to change everything.”

“Do they know more than that?”

“No. Like I said, it’s all rumors. But in the hacker community, rumor is everything. Reputations are built on rumor. Mine was. Half the hacks that are reportedly my doing never were.” She sighs. “But this one checks out. I found a deleted series of conversations with a buyer from an IP address that links to one I can connect to some recently pirated games. The encryptions are high-grade, and it’s going to take some time to break it down. But I think we might actually have something.” 

“Then there’s still one mission going on that I’d like to keep an eye on.” Patty disappears for a few minutes, only to return with two mugs of coffee. Riley takes one gratefully and keeps working. It takes hours to break encryptions this strong, but she has all night. 

Fortunately, it doesn’t take that long. One of the random attempts her program made hit pay dirt, and all of a sudden, the screen is full of an IM chat that was supposedly wiped from existence. _ Nothing on the internet is ever really gone, didn’t anyone teach you that? _Riley continues typing, then stops, frozen. 

“Whatever Sheng was selling, and he doesn’t say, he was selling it to Armand Moreau.” Riley is familiar with Moreau, everyone in the US intelligence circle is. The man’s done enough to put him on the wanted lists of every agency in the country, and quite a few foreign ones as well. He’s a former French special forces operator who was court-martialed for selling weapons to terrorist cells, and disappeared before he was able to be tried for it. He’s popped up in the past ten years in hot spots around the globe, arming both sides of conflicts and profiting off it impressively. And then five years ago he vanished. 

_ Whatever Sheng had was important enough to lure this man out of retirement. _ That in itself is a terrifying thought. Whether this is the buy that went bad or not, they have no way of knowing, Riley already ran Friar on everyone from the security cameras and can’t get a positive on anyone as Moreau. _ Maybe he had someone else do his dirty work. _

“I think this is as good a reason as any for Phoenix to get involved,” Patty says. “You’re officially given permission to open an investigation.”

* * *

JOHNNIE SHENG’S APARTMENT

EVEN A BACHELOR PAD SHOULDN’T BE THIS MESSY

“Wow,” Jack mumbles, glancing around the room. _ I didn’t even get to kick in the door. _ It was hanging off its hinges when they arrived, even the crime scene tape torn down and tossed aside. 

Inside, the stuffing from all the expensive leather-upholstered furniture has been pulled out of slashed cushions, a heap of smashed plates and glasses litters the kitchen, and every one of the strange swirly-ink modern art pictures decorating the walls has been pulled down. Someone turned the clearly once designer-worthy apartment inside out. 

He woke up to at least one piece of good news, Phoenix managed to get the Sheng case out of LAPD hands. Of course, that had to come with the caveat that they’re now hunting Moreau, that psycho French arms dealer. Jack had heard scuttlebutt from Worthy that the guy had blown himself up with one of his merchandise demonstrations. Clearly, that wasn’t accurate. 

“This place has been torn apart,” Jack says slowly. 

“No kidding.” Riley frowns. “This wasn’t LAPD. This was someone who wanted something and didn’t care what they had to do to get it.”

“And didn’t care that someone was going to find out they were looking,” Jack says. “You think they found it?”

“No.” Mac is studying a wall, with a strange expression on his face. “This wall is exposed brick.”

“So, the guy was into hipster style.” Bozer says, frowning. “What’s it telling you that it’s not telling us?”

“That there are hundreds of perfect hiding places all over this wall.” Mac is running his hands over it, frowning and occasionally tapping at specific bricks or feeling his way along a seam of the mortar. 

Jack grins. “Oooh, like those glasses in National Treasure? Dude, do you see a brick with some kinda freaky symbol on it? Wait, are we missing a treasure map somewhere?”

“No symbols, but I do see a section of this wall that looks a little less worn. See the mortar here?” Mac points. “It’s been redone and painted to resemble the more weathered areas, but the color doesn’t match exactly.”

“What’s the world coming to when cheap crooks can’t even manage a little interior decorating? Hey, maybe I should go into that tile business after all. Offer professional stash site creation.” 

Mac taps a finger against the wall and then rushes off toward the kitchen, digging through the mess on the floor. Jack follows, flinching as he watches the kid rummage through piles of shattered glass and ceramic. _ He’ll be lucky if he doesn’t slice his hand open. _

Mac gives a shout of triumph, holding up a plastic bottle of white vinegar. “Okay, kid, what are you gonna do, make pickles? Or salad dressing?”

Mac shakes his head. “Most of these mortar compounds are alkaline or lime based. These acids should eat away at it, help make it a little more porous and easy to remove.” He pours the vinegar over the brick and mortar, and Jack watches it make its way down the wall. The sharp strong smell permeates the room. Mac keeps pouring, letting the liquid soak in before he starts again, until he uses up the bottle. Then he pulls out his knife.

“Well, without more vinegar, this is as good as it’s gonna get.” Mac chips away at the mortar with the can opener blade of his knife. “It’s still pretty fresh. I’d say this was done in the last few days. It’s barely set up.” He removes one brick, checks the back of it and the gap in the wall, and shakes his head. Jack moves in to help, pulling out one of his tac knives to chip away at the crumbling mortar. They pull out three more bricks before Mac holds one up with a grin. 

“Not quite Ben Franklin glasses,” Jack says, when Mac tips out a flashdrive into his hand. “Riley?” He hands her the drive and she plugs it into the secure port on her rig. 

“Whatever this is is heavily encrypted. Give me a few minutes.” Riley’s frowning. “This is a government level encryption. Chinese military grade. And…” Her computer pings. “It’s in my database.”

“That’s a little scary,” Bozer says. 

“Looks like he was running something a little more valuable than ripoff video games,” Riley says, looking up from her computer, eyes wide. “Those are Chinese nuclear codes.” 

“Well, unless he’s planning on playing ‘Global Thermonuclear War’,” Jack says, then adds in a robotic voice, “Would you like. To play. A game?”

“Let’s get these back to Phoenix,” Riley says. “But in the meantime, in case our friends decide to come out to play…” She opens her rig. “I’ll run a program to fake the codes, and then I’m going to pose as Sheng’s partner. Say he gave me the data for safekeeping, but I’m worried and there’s a lot of heat with the murder. I’ll ask for only half the payment to be wired to a dummy account, then give him the location of the dummy codes. With any luck, he’ll respond to it, and I’ll be able to get a location.” She continues typing. “It looks like Sheng was holding out on his buyer. He probably decided he could ask for more money for something this valuable. Whoever the buyer was killed him, probably in a fit of rage. Like Leanna said, it wasn’t planned. He or she might have thought Sheng had the codes already on him, and got frustrated when they weren’t there.”

“Alright. You work your magic, we’ll take these back to Phoenix and let Patty know she should probably call anyone she knows in the Chinese government,” Jack says. It’s a quiet ride back to Phoenix. Something about all of this feels surreal. Jack is beginning to understand Matty’s eternal frustration with them. _ Why do we always end up unintentionally stumbling into giant disasters? _Then again, he’s begun to wonder if that’s a side effect of being around Mac, who just cares too much about people for his own damn good. 

It’s not too long before Riley walks into the War Room.“Well, I’ve got the fake codes created and the message sent, from a cyber cafe so he can’t trace _ me _.” Riley says. “Hopefully he bites.” 

“So we’re good to go?” Jack asks. 

“Not exactly. I have chatter saying Moreau _ could _have been the intended buyer, and he’s the only one I can think of who’s gutsy enough to trash that apartment like that under the nose of the LAPD. But that doesn’t mean that’s who Sheng was meeting at the theater. It’s possible Moreau had a middle man, since he wasn’t caught on any of the cameras.” 

Matty speaks up. “We don’t have the full coroner’s report yet, but our forensics people are working on a more detailed one than LAPD would have gotten anyway. And initial reports indicate there were signs of struggle, that Sheng was fighting with his attacker in the theater. Maybe something from our mystery killer’s clothing got torn off. Or maybe there’s some of his blood there too.” 

“Okay, Mac and I’ll go check the place out. It’s still a crime scene, so we shouldn’t be disturbed.” Still, Jack checks his gun and grabs an extra mag. Just in case. Because clearly crime scene tape isn’t much of a deterrent for Moreau and his men. 

* * *

PHOENIX LABS

Bozer avoids looking too closely at the photos attached to the report Jill has spread out over her desk. “Our forensics team finished their initial investigation, and as reported earlier, there were signs of a struggle, including slight bruising on the knuckles and face and what we believed to be tissue under the fingernails.” 

She shakes her head, tucking one side of her hair behind her ear, but leaving the other curls loose and falling over her burn-scarred cheek. “However, when we analyzed the samples from under the fingernails, we found that it wasn’t human tissue at all. There were traces of...latex and paint. Like something that would be used in…”

“A stage mask.” Bozer says, frowning. “Guys. What if we’ve been wrong this whole time?”

“About Moreau being the buyer?” Riley says. She’s leaning on Mac’s desk, idly flicking a small spinner-looking thing he has set there.

“Sort of. What if we thought he had a middle man doing his work...when it was him all along?” Bozer rushes over to his desk and grabs a mask. “I just made ten of these on the same mold, testing different materials to bind the base and see if I could finally make one of them waterproof. But…” He stops to collect his wandering train of thought; waterproof masks are going to be his breakthrough contribution to Phoenix R&D...if he ever figures out a formula. “I could make these all identical. Someone could go a month or more with a different face than their normal one, and no one would ever know the difference.”

“And the best place to be an actor blending in is with a crowd of other actors.” Sam says. _ I never even heard her come in. Damn she’s good. _ “Where’s that cast list again?” Riley pulls it up on her rig and hands it over. Cage picks it up, skimming it until she stops and taps the screen. “Who is this Herve Laroux?”

“A director/producer from Baton Rouge,” Bozer says. “We checked out his background, he seems legitimate. And there’s video of him in productions while Moreau was still in special forces operations. There’s no way it’s him, he’s real.” 

“Does he still have an actor profile circulating?”

“Why?”

“Trust me.”

“I saved it somewhere, along with the videos.” Riley takes her computer back. “Here, this is everything I have on him.”

Cage opens a couple documents and leans over the computer screen, frowning. Then she straightens up suddenly, turning around. 

“The real Herve Laroux is 5’6. The LAPD report shows a Herve Laroux who is 5’9. People don’t just hit growth spurts after their thirties.” Cage moved toward the door. “That director is a fake.” 

* * *

THIS THEATER IS A CRIME SCENE

CLEARLY NO ONE RESPECTS THAT

Jack peeks around a corner of the backstage hallway, and then jumps when a flashlight beam cuts across his face. He reaches instinctively for his gun, but moves his hand away from his belt when he recognizes the face behind the light that’s currently blinding him. 

“Penny, what the hell are you doing here?” Jack asks.

“Investigating. What are _ you _doing here?”

“Same thing.” Mac says, coming up behind Jack. It sounds like he trips over something on the floor on the way, because there’s a scratching swish of his foot catching something, a muffled yelp, and a thud of him catching himself against the wall. Jack won’t admit how much he’s missed his occasionally klutzy kid. “The case got turned over to a government agency for some reason, and Jack has friends there.” 

“One friend in particular. I owe her a favor, and she’s collecting. Since I’m already involved in all this.” Jack shrugs. “Besides, you know me, I like sticking my nose in places I’m not really supposed to.”

“I think you might be in the wrong business,” Penny chuckles. “You should have been a detective.” 

“Well, this guy walked on me a few years ago, some technicality in court. It’s personal.” Jack figures stretching the truth a little isn’t that bad. He and Sarah did get sent with a task force after Moreau, but they never got him. The slippery bastard wriggled out of every trap they set. “I figure anything I can do to put a psycho like this behind bars is a good day’s work.”

“Is he a serial killer?” Penny asks. 

Jack just nods. It’s close enough. _ We can’t exactly tell her that we’re looking for someone who was going to buy nuclear launch codes. _ Jack isn’t sure how much Penny knows, but it can’t be the whole truth. At least not about what the Phoenix Foundation really is. _ I’m sure she suspects things aren’t what they seemed, after all the weird stuff Mac kept doing, but for her own safety, she has to be kept in the dark. _

Mac frowns. “This place was a restricted access crime scene...still is, technically. So you shouldn’t be here.”

“Then call your friend, have her kick me out.” _ She’s trying to call our bluff. _ Jack knew he wasn’t convincing enough. _ She knows more than she’s telling, but she also knows when not to push too hard for a concrete answer. _ Still, she’s smart enough to use the fact that they have secrets to her own advantage _ . _

“Fine, but you stay with me and Mac. Don’t wander off. That’s how the pretty girl dies in every horror movie, you know that right?”

Penny sighs. “You know those movies are ridiculously plotted, right? No one would actually be as stupid as people act in them.”

“You and Mac need to have a ‘deconstruct-the-horror-movie’ conversation at some point. At length. He’s ruined all my favorite classics.”

“I only said it was physically impossible, due to the nature of physical mutation and entropy, for radiation to produce a giant monster from a lizard.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, ‘there is no good kind’. I know.” 

“It might not have been the best idea to aggravate your lawyer, Mac,” Penny says with a chuckle. 

“I have to admit, he presented solid evidence,” Jack says. “So far, I haven’t been able to find a good rebuttal.” Sometimes he forgets Penny doesn’t know how close they really are. She thinks they’re just a lawyer and a former client, who stayed on good terms. 

“So we’re looking for what here, exactly?” Penny asks. “Just clues?”

“Coroner’s report indicated a struggle. They’re still trying to get some forensic evidence from the body, but it’s also possible that whoever he was fighting with might have left some blood, or hair, or a scrap of clothing at the scene of the crime. And since no one has found it yet, that means whoever killed him went to a while lot of trouble to clean it well.” 

“Yes.” Mac shudders. “The body was...well, like you said, there wasn’t a lot of blood in the trunk. So he bled out wherever he was killed.” 

“Don’t be shy on my account,” Penny says. “I’ve seen a lot of crime scene photos.” 

“So we’re looking for someplace really clean,” Jack says. “And out of the way, because no one heard signs of a struggle. Someplace there would have been extra trunks, he couldn’t have dragged that body far to stow it.”

“That sounds like deep storage,” Penny says. “It’s just a basement, we don’t put much down there because it gets damp and musty, but sometimes we store broken scenery and equipment. And that’s where the janitor keeps his cleaning supplies, and his closet has a mop sink. There’s a drain in the floor in the middle of the room, too.

“Sounds like the perfect place to hide a murder,” Jack says. “Lead the way.” 

Penny leads them to a small door hidden at the side of the hall. When she opens it, it creaks rustily, and the opening reveals nothing but a blank blackness and a couple stairs stretching down into it. 

“No lights,” Jack says as Penny reaches for them. “Mac, you brought your blacklight thingamajig, right?” The kid nods. “He’ll check for any traces of blood.” Forensics has swept the place once already, but Moreau hasn’t evaded capture for a decade without being good at covering his tracks. Still, Mac is better. Jack is sure of that. They turn on flashlights instead. 

They’re about halfway down the stairs when Jack’s comms start buzzing. He sees Mac cringe and reach for his ear too. Jack can tell only enough to know it’s Bozer, and he’s saying something about results. Proably forensics is done with the body. 

His phone rings, and he picks up. Bozer’s voice is there now, but just as distorted and garbled. 

“Bozer, you’re breaking up.” Jack shakes his head. “We’re too far underground under all this concrete. Mac, I’m gonna head back to the surface, and try to see what Bozer’s so interested in telling me. You coming?”

Mac shakes his head, staring down in the darkness, where Penny and her own little gleam of a flashlight are vanishing. “I have to go down there.”

“Not without me, kiddo.” Jack rests a hand on Mac’s arm. “You don’t have to be perfectly okay right now. You don’t have to push yourself too far.” He knows what’s going through his poor kid’s messed up mind right now. That if he can’t handle this, he can’t handle the field. 

“I’ll wait here. Penny’s still going down, I can’t leave her, and if we call her back she’s gonna argue.” Jack doesn’t like the idea of leaving Mac here in the dark on the stairs, with only his flashlight and knife to defend himself if that psycho arms dealer comes back. But at some point, he has to start trusting Mac. Or he’ll only make the damage worse. Hovering and micromanaging Mac’s life is only going to remind the kid of how Murdoc treated him, and also make him feel like Jack and the team think he isn’t capable of looking after himself. 

“Okay, but you better be here when I get back.” 

* * *

DEEP STORAGE

THIS ISN’T SCARY AT ALL…

Mac takes a deep, shaky breath. _ You’re okay. You’re okay. _ But the dark underground room, the smell of mold and dampness, the clammy chill in the air, it just reminds him of Murdoc. That creep seems to have a penchant for dark cellars and holes in the ground, or at least when it comes to his places to keep Mac. He can’t breathe, he can’t think, he’s so cold...

_ Murdoc isn’t here. And you aren’t chained or handcuffed or drugged. Get a grip and do this. _ He promised Sam he was fine. That he could go back to the field. He can’t let memories scare him. They can’t hurt him. 

But the fact remains that the darkness scares him. That the shadows of broken mannequins against the walls make his heart rate spike and his whole body shake. That he imagines Murdoc’s eyes in the blackness, the hands sliding over his body, the soft cruel whispers and the sharp moments of pain. His chest feels like it’s burning, in the spot over his heart where Murdoc cut in his cruel scar. The wound healed more cleanly than Mac was afraid of, but there will always be a scar. And physical scars are nothing compared to the scars Murdoc has left in his mind.

And when Jack comes back he has to turn the flashlights off so he can use the blacklight. He takes another shaky breath.

He can hear Penny down there, muttering to herself. “Don’t touch anything,” he calls down softly. “We should wait for Jack.”

“I know.” Her face appears in the ring of light from his flashlight. “But I heard something.”

“You heard something?”

“I think someone else is down here, and I don’t know if they know we’re here.”

“Does no one respect the active crime scene notices?” Mac asks, sighing. “We should get out of here and tell Jack. Because it could be the killer.”

“And what if he’s gone by the time Jack gets back?” Penny asks. “The stairs aren’t the only way out of the basement, there’s access tunnels that link it to two other buildings in this row. They were all connected once, and if you have the keys to the doors…” Mac has the feeling he doesn’t want to know how Penny knows this one. “But if someone goes and stalls him, someone who has a legitimate reason to be in the theater…”

Mac doesn’t like where this is going. _ This has to be how Jack feels about me when I make stupid plans. _“Penny, don’t…”

“I’ll be fine.” She says sharply. “They won’t know I know anything; I’m always hanging around here in my spare time, and I’m an actress. I can pretend I don’t know anything about what’s going on. I’ll buy you some time to get Jack.” She shrugs. “I think it’s just Mr. Laroux anyway. He practically lives here, and he doesn’t pay much attention to signs in English, it’s a quirk he has.” She hurries back down the stairs.

_ It might be nothing. Maybe Moreau is too smart to return to the scene of the crime when he already cleaned it. Maybe this is just some thrill-seeker kids or some theater staff who decided to take a chance and break the rules. _

But the fact remains that Moreau or his lackey may still believe that the codes are somewhere here. After all, when they couldn’t be found at Sheng’s apartment, it might have driven Moreau back here. 

“Mr. Laroux?” Penny is saying. “Why are you here? And what are you...looking for?”

_ “It’s just Mr. Laroux. He practically lives here.” “Moreau...hide...mask...direc…” _Suddenly Mac has all too clear an idea of what Bozer was trying to tell them. But it’s too late to warn Penny. She’s walking right into danger, and she has no idea. Or maybe she does, given the way her voice just changed. 

Mac switches off his flashlight and starts down the stairs. 

“What are _ you _ doing here?” The accent in the man’s voice is suddenly more pronounced.

“Looking for my annotated script. I think I left it in my dressing room.”

“Then what are you doing all the way down here?” Mac hears a sharp yelp, like Penny’s been grabbed. “I knew you were going to make trouble. You nosy little thwarted heroes. Always wanted to be a police officer, but you’ve only ever been able to get a job sitting behind a desk and listening to sob stories. You should have kept your nose in your parolees’ business, not mine.” 

Mac edges around something that looks vaguely like a sarcophagus. Maybe if he can create a distraction he can get Penny away from this guy. And then he sees three more shadows peel themselves off the walls, or so it seems in the dim light. The only clearly visible thing about them is the glitter of guns in their hands. If he makes a move now, he risks Penny getting shot in the ensuing chaos. _ Where is Jack? _ Probably still searching for signal.

He glances around. _ Can I do something that would incapacitate them all? _ There’s a janitorial closet down here somewhere, Penny said so. He’s had fairly poor luck lately with his chloroform, but he could try it…

“Look. Sheng’s partner just offered a deal.” An unfamiliar voice speaks up. “They’re offering the codes for half the price we agreed on, they’re worried about the heat from this murder.”

“Take it.” Moreau’s voice is sharp. “So he had a partner after all. Come on. Move it. I don’t want to wait around here any longer; we’re going to have those codes in hand in an hour. And deal with this little problem.”

There’s the sound of a struggle, like Penny is fighting back. _ Come on, get away from them, just a little bit. That’s all I need _.

“Damn you!” There’s a sharp slapping sound, and a muffled gasp. “Don’t make me shoot you.” And then he can hear the scuffle of feet across the concrete. 

He doesn’t dare move. Not until he hears a door slam and footsteps grow fainter. Then he jumps up and hurries back the way he came. 

He almost slams into Jack on the stairs. Jack looks like he’s close to panicking himself. _ Right. I promised him I wouldn’t leave that spot, and when he came back I wasn’t there. _ He’ll apologize for scaring the hell out of his partner later. 

“Mac?”

“Penny got caught.” Mac says, twisting his fingers together. “And if we don’t do something, they’re gonna kill her.”

* * *

CAR TRUNK

JUST AS SCARY AS IT LOOKS IN THE MOVIES

Penny rolls back and forth as the car starts and stops, lurching along in LA traffic. She’s trying to knock out a taillight like she saw in a movie once, but that isn’t exactly working with her feet tied together and then bound to her hands behind her. 

_ If this guy really was a serial killer, I think I’d be hacked up in little pieces like that guy in the trunk right now. _ But the things he said down there weren’t the kind of things that in her experience, psychotic people of that variety mention. And serial killers don’t usually have a whole team of fellow monsters. This is looking a whole lot less like a lone deranged lunatic, and a whole lot more like a lot of deranged lunatics in a terror cell. She’s had plenty of training in how to identify that. _ Before I became a parole officer I had dreams of joining the CIA. But I never passed the entry physical questionnaire. _

Now that she has a new medication, her seizures are much more manageable, but she’s kind of afraid she might have one any minute. She hasn’t taken her medication yet today, she was supposed to at lunch and it's in her purse now, wherever that is, and high stress levels tend to make the seizures worse. She could predict the one that happened inevitably each exam season. And she’s feeling the same sort of fuzzy, blurred dizziness right now. 

The car fishtails around a corner, and she screams into the cloth tied over her mouth. And then there’s the all too familiar feeling of losing control. The panic sets in, and it’s almost a relief when the whole thing overtaxes her and the world goes dark. 

She’s not sure how long it is that she’s blacked out for, but when she wakes up she’s no longer in the car trunk, she’s tied to a chair in some kind of warehouse. Everything looks blurry, her muscles are aching, and she can smell something like sulfur. She’s not sure if the smell is real or one of the strange symptoms she’s learned to associate with post-seizure recovery. 

A man is standing in front of her. Half his face is scarred, and the other half doesn’t look familiar, but the clothes she recognizes. _ Mr. Laroux...wasn’t actually who he said he was. _And the fact that he hasn’t covered her head, that he’s let her see his face, means he doesn’t plan to let her leave this place alive. He’s even taken off the gag, wherever they are he’s sure she won’t be heard. So she’s got nothing to lose. 

“Aren’t you going to tell me why you kidnapped me?”

“Shut up.” A backhand slap makes her teeth slice into her lip and draw blood. She’s had worse, though, like the irate guy who got pissed off when she demanded he do a drug test and punched her in the face three times before she managed to get him under control by twisting his arm. She had a black eye for two weeks. _ I hate how my mind wanders when I’m postictal. _It’s always been par for the course with her seizures. Memories get jumpy and out of order, and things that happened three years ago feel like yesterday. Or vice versa. 

She forces her sluggish brain back to the situation at hand. “You want something from me. Or you’d have killed me in that car trunk and disposed of the whole thing.” Penny says. “You don’t mind doing your own dirty work. And you’d have gotten away with it if the lights hadn’t gotten fried and someone came looking for you to tell you. You were taking the trunk outside, weren’t you? But you had to stash it in the prop room and respond to the emergency, or it would have looked suspicious.” 

“Oh, I see. You like to play detective as well as leading lady, is that it?” Laroux...or whoever he is...chuckles. “Well, then, what else do you know?” He steps in, his smile menacing in his twisted face. “How about who else you’ve told about these little theories of yours?”

“I didn’t tell anyone else. I was just...curious. A real live murder mystery. I wanted to take a look at the scene of the crime.” He thinks she’s inane, a flake, like everyone else does when they first meet her. Maybe she can use that. “I promise, I didn’t have any idea what was happening until you and your thugs kidnapped me.”

“Now see, I don’t believe that.” A hand is suddenly fisted in her hair, pulling it backward painfully. “You may be a good actress, Penny Parker, but not good enough to fool me. You are holding back. And I want the truth. Who else knows about us?”

“No one, I swear!” Penny didn’t think this was how she was going to die. But if she’s going out at the hands of a bunch of criminals, she’s going to be proud of how it ends. _ I’m not going to give up my friends. _ She’s pretty sure Mac and Jack are probably planning to save her right now. _ Mac was a vigilante. He knows what he’s doing. _

“I think you are lying. But soon it will not matter.” She flinches. _ Does he know Mac and Jack know? Did he see them at the theater? Is he going to try to kidnap them too? _ She fights back a pained laugh at the thought of anyone trying to take those two. _ Mac escaped cartels _ and _ police for years. And Jack is ex-military, I know it. _ Honestly she wouldn’t be at all surprised to find out that they were a lot more than a think tank employee and a lawyer. _ Mac came into my office with all kinds of injuries and clearly forced cover stories for why he was late or missed a meeting. _ Either he was up to his old vigilante tricks again, or more likely, he was hired by something a lot more interested in his less than legal skills than a research and development group. 

She’s never asked, she has the feeling telling anyone that she has suspicions would end with her in a small concrete box with no windows and no human contact. 

Maybe she can call his bluff. “I have nothing to tell you. You might as well just kill me now.” 

“Well, it will be close enough.” The man chuckles, deep and evilly. “Very soon, as soon as my men crack the encryptions on those codes, there will be a little demonstration of our new merchandise. And this city…” he shrugs expressively, hands spread wide. “And the best part is, no one will know who to blame. They’ll think China is simply washing their hands of responsibility when their government denies involvement.” _Oh no._ _Sheng must have sold them some kind of weapon. Maybe even..._it sounds an awful lot like this guy got himself access to nuclear launch codes. 

“You can’t actually mean to start a war. You have no idea what you’d unleash.”

“Oh, war, Miss Parker, is where men like me thrive.” His dark eyes are flashing bitterly. “And I have grown tired of watching weak men struggle to prevent it.”

“You’re insane.”

“Am I? Or am I the sanest one of all? Tell me, Penny, only a madman would seek to stop the inevitable. Men will always crave war. It is in their blood.” 

“You sound like a villain from one of our plays.” She spits the words out bitterly. “Don’t you know how they all end?”

“I’m afraid, my dear, this one is a tragedy.” He turns and walks out. “Oh. And if you would consider escaping, I would advise against it. If you break your bonds, you die. A little sooner, and much more painfully. I promise, soon, it will all be over in one quick flash.” 

* * *

THE PHOENIX FOUNDATION

Mac paces back and forth in the War Room. “I can’t believe we just lost her like that.”

“I’m trying but there is a network of connections between the buildings, and the one to the left of the theater has its own underground parking. I’m tracking every car that came out of there, but that’s still a lot of ground to cover.” 

“Would it help if I said I noticed she wears a smart watch?” Leanna asks. “I watched her put it on in the back room, I remember thinking it looked really funny against her Cleopatra costume. I told Bozer he needed to write a sci-fi epic but with a setting like Ancient Egypt.” 

“Yes. If she was wearing it today I can track its location…” Riley pauses. “Guys, it’s flashing an alert that she’s had a seizure, it’s a monitor.”

Mac nods. “She told me she used to have them a lot when she was a teenager. She’s got them under control, but if she didn’t have her medication, and with everything that happened…”

“It looks like her vitals are still stable. Her heart rate is pretty elevated, but that’s probably stress. She’s okay. For now.”

“But she won’t be if we don’t find her,” Jack says. “She knows too much, there’s no way Moreau would let her live.”

“I have a location. And she hasn’t moved in the past twenty minutes, so this must be where they’re holding her.” Riley looks up. “And Moreau took the bait on the codes. One of his people is trying to crack the encryption right now, and given that I put my best work into this, they’re gonna be at it a while. Which gives us plenty of time to track him down.”

Matty sighs. “Normally, I would say let the local authorities get Penny, but given that she’s our only material witness in the Moreau case, Phoenix needs to bring her in for a debrief. It’s not ideal, since we’ll have to reveal our identity as a covert agency, but it’s better than fighting with LAPD over jurisdiction.”

“Send a tac team to Moreau, we’ll go for Penny,” Jack says, checking his gun. 

Mac nods, looking down at his hands. They’re shaking. “Thanks for coming with me, Jack,” he says quietly when they get into the car. 

“Aww kiddo.” Jack turns to him for a moment before starting the GTO. “I’m so sorry I wasn’t there for you before.”

“It’s okay,” Mac says, even though it’s not okay at all. Not yet. “But...I told Sam I was okay because I have my team. Because even if I can’t do something...I trust you guys to help me.” 

Jack almost slams his car into the side of a semi as he turns into another lane. “What did you just say?”

“That I...I’ve accepted that some things are going to change. I know my brain might not recover, not the way I was. And that scares me, but it’s not as scary when I know there are other people watching my back.”

“I think you might finally understand how this team is supposed to work,” Jack says. “And thank God, because after you ran off to play Lone Ranger and hunt your dad, I was thinking you might never figure it out.” He shakes his head. “You scared me, Mac. Please promise me you won’t do that again.”

Mac nods. But Jack doesn’t look as reassured as Mac was hoping for. _ Why did he look so sad when I said I’m going to rely on my team more? _ It’s almost like something about that scared Jack. _ He’s always pushed me to depend on him and Riley and Bozer and the others, that I don’t need to do everything alone. So why would me finally understanding that bother him? _

He wants to ask, but this isn’t the time, because Jack is pulling up outside the warehouse Riley’s tracker says Penny is in. 

“Alright, kiddo, thermal says she’s the only one in there. But that means there’s gotta be some catch. Moreau’s too careful to leave someone who knows anything about him to potentially escape.” 

Mac nods. He and Jack carefully check the window Jack picked as their point of entry for any kind of tripwires or triggers before he breaks it. At the tinkle of glass, he hears someone shout. 

“Don’t come in here! Call the police! There’s a bomb!”

“Penny it’s me! It’s Mac! We’re here to get you out.” Mac follows the source of the shouting to a room closed off by a thick metal door with a mesh-covered glass window. Inside, he can see Penny tied to a chair, and there’s a backpack positioned beneath her. _ She wasn’t kidding, there is a bomb. And not a small one. _

“Mac?”

“And Jack,” Jack calls in. “Don’t worry, Penny. We’ll get you out of here.” 

“Don’t worry about me. There were some guys in here, they just left. Maybe twenty minutes ago. They’re going to kill a lot of people if someone doesn’t stop them.”

“Someone else is going to take care of them. I’m not leaving you here.” Mac says. He can see the wires running from the cuffs on her wrists down to whatever is in the backpack under her chair. 

“They have nuclear launch codes…”

“No they don’t. We do.” Mac gives her a tiny smile. 

Jack nods. “The ones he has are fakes. We found Sheng’s stash first, and replaced the real codes with a set of phony ones. When they try to use them, all they’ll trigger will be a tracker that lets Riley find the location of their computers.”

“I knew you didn’t really work for a think tank!” Penny says triumphantly. “You’re a secret spy organization, aren’t you?”

_ We didn’t even have to tell her. _ “You can’t tell anyone else.”

“My lips are sealed.” Penny says. “But you didn’t think I just figured that out now, did you?”

Mac shrugs. 

“I’ve known since...Christmas the year before last. Something about the way you two and Riley just kind of seemed to conveniently have really good excuses for a narrowly avoided international incident you were all way too involved in. I only _ act _ like I don’t know what’s going on past the end of my nose.” She gives Mac a weak smile. “I learned a long time ago that the best way to outsmart people is to make them underestimate you. More than a few parolees learned the hard way that I’m actually paying attention.” 

Mac kneels down next to the backpack, checking the zipper for triggers before undoing it. “You never said anything to me about it.”

“You were saving the world, not trying to burn it down.” She shrugs. “And now...well, I figure if I might die in the next hour, I should probably get that off my chest.” 

“He’s not gonna let you die.” Jack says confidently. “So you might still need to worry about our bosses finding out you know our secret and throwing you in a black site.”

“Really?” Penny’s eyes are wide.

“Not unless you tell anyone else,” Jack says with a chuckle. “Sorry. I was trying to lighten the mood.”

“It didn’t really work…”

Mac focuses on tracing the paths of the wires, shuddering when he sees his hands start to shake again. _ Deep breaths. Stay calm, you can do this. _ He glances at Jack, then back to the bomb, and some of the dizzy fuzziness slips away. He’s frustrated and scared, but Jack is here so it’s going to be okay. _ Somewhere when that trauma scrambled my brain, it left the association of Jack with safety intact _. That’s good enough for now. “Did Moreau say anything that might help me know how to disarm this?” He frowns at her confused expression. “The man who was pretending to be Laroux.”

“He said if I struggled, it would be over. Um...if I broke my bonds, those were his exact words. Thank goodness for theater training in memorization, huh?”

“Yeah,” Mac says, examining the way the wires are woven into the ropes around Penny’s wrists and the slats of the chair. 

“I knew you disarmed cartel bombs, but seeing it in person…” Penny’s voice is a little shaky. “You did this every night?”

“No, sometimes I...uh...was the one blowing things up. Or setting them on fire.” Mac shrugs. He hears Jack groan. _ Okay, bad time to mention that. _Jack hates being reminded how many times Mac almost died before they even met.

“I still can’t believe you did that. I’m...honestly pretty freaked out right now.” 

“It’s gonna be fine, Penny. Trust me.”

“I do trust you.” She smiles, just a little. “I knew I could from the minute I met you.”

“That meant a lot to me.” Penny’s confidence in him had been much-needed. _ That was before even my team really was willing to totally put their lives in my hands. _But Penny had looked at even the horror story his file was and decided he was worth helping. “The world needs more people like you, and it can’t afford to lose the ones it has.”

“The world needs more people like you, too.” 

“Not that I don’t love a good little heart-to-heart as much as the next guy, but I think that might need to be saved for when we’re not literally sitting on a ticking time bomb?” Jack says. 

“It’s a shrapnel bomb, I think.” Mac cringes. “These are a nasty piece of work. But it’s not on a timer. It’s just wired to these.” He points out the wires that snake into Penny’s ropes. “So, it looks like this is the kind that is set off if we break this circuit, which we have to do to get these ropes off you. So we just need something else to bridge the circuit.” He pulls a paperclip out of his pocket. 

“I remember those!” Penny says. “I found little sculptures all over my office after our sessions. I miss them.” She stops. “I mean, I guess that sounded a little insensitive. I’m glad we don’t have to meet anymore. I’m glad you got cleared.”

“Me too.” Mac carefully lowers the paperclip into the space he can see. _ This needs to work. If I guessed wrong, we both die. _But he knows he didn’t. Pena trained him too well for that. “Okay, I’m gonna cut the ropes now.” Mac says.

“Do it.” Penny has her eyes squeezed shut. 

“It’s gonna be okay. I’ve got this.” And then he starts slicing through the ropes. “Okay, you can stand up now.” He bends down again, glancing at the bomb. “Now, let’s get out of here.” 

* * *

THE PHOENIX FOUNDATION

DEFINITELY NOT JUST A THINK TANK THAT LIKES HIRING EX-CONS

“Moreau is on his way to a black site, and the real nuclear codes have already been changed, thanks to some calls from our boss. So even the ones we have are no good.” Jack says as he opens the door and lets Penny out into the last bit of sunset light. “Unfortunately, your theater’s out a director…”

“You know, Bozer _ already _ offered to replace him?” Penny giggles, she feels like the adrenaline is giving her some kind of high. _ Is this what it always feels like for them? _ Even though she sat in a grey, featureless debriefing room for the past three hours, she still hasn’t stopped buzzing. _ Okay, maybe some of it is the aftereffects of the seizure too. _She has her medication again, but it still always takes a few hours to come down from the chaos of her brain misfiring. 

“I brought you back your phone.” Mac hands it back with a small smile; when they got the fake Mr. Laroux they’d found it smashed in the back of the vehicle his people were using. Mac had taken it and promised to have it back to her in one piece by the time her debrief was over. “I’ve broken Jack’s so many times that I’ve gotten really good at making up for it. And since the ‘Genius Bar’ doesn’t buy anything but the ruggedized versions now, this one should last you a while.” 

“Mac’s the _ reason _ the Genius Bar doesn’t even bother to order normal phones,” Jack chuckles. “Thanks to Mac, my phone has been submerged, set on fire, exposed to radioactive waste, and stepped on by an elephant.” Penny giggles at the last one, there has to be a good story there. “He’s also lost them,” Jack says. “I have one at the bottom of a lake in Minnesota, there’s one strapped to the wreckage of a smuggler’s plane in the Andes…”

“In my defense, how was I to know they were going to run into a storm and crash?” Mac asks. Penny giggles. _ This is fantastic. _ It sounds like dialogue ripped straight from a spy thriller. But it’s just Mac’s everyday life. _ I knew he was made for more than a regular nine-to-five. _ She’s glad he’s out there saving the world. And she’s just a tiny bit proud that she’s been able to be a part of helping him get there. 

“I’m telling you, kid, you should retire and get a job doing testimonials for OtterBox. You’d get to break phones all day and get paid for it.”

“I get to do that here, too.” 

Penny tunes out the playful bickering and turns on the phone. The second it loads, there’s a barrage of texts, missed calls, and voicemails. She opens the texts and groans. 

“Oh no! I was supposed to meet Mark for dinner. And I’m already half an hour late. Should I call him and tell him I won’t be able to make it?”

“Nope. Call him and tell him you’ll be there in ten minutes,” Jack says. 

“But it was at that new sushi place on the pier; that’s halfway across town…”

“Trust me. Jack can get us there. He knows every shortcut and he’s a certified pursuit driver,” Mac says. “But you...uh...might want to buckle up.” 

Nine and a half minutes later, Penny is very glad she followed Mac’s advice. She might have _ slightly _exaggerated how far away they were, but still, she didn’t think it was going to be possible to get there in less than half an hour. 

When they walk into the lobby, Penny spots Mark at his table, looking at his phone. He’s probably just gotten the text she sent that she’s on her way. _ He won’t expect me yet, not for a little. _She can’t wait to surprise him. 

“Well, we’ll leave you two to your dinner,” Jack says, and he and Mac start toward the door. But before they leave, Mac turns around and hands her a paperclip bent into the shape of a star.

“Penny? Where were you? I’ve been calling your phone and getting nothing!” Mark says when she walks up, pulling her into a hug and ignoring the startled mutters of the others at the nearby tables.

“Oh, I was just...rehearsing, and I lost track of the time.” She smiles. “You know, I think the next production we put on should be _ Dial ‘M’ for Murder _. I’m really in the mood to try a thriller. You know, expand my range.” 

She’s already been told to stay quiet about her role in all of this. It’s technically illegal for Mac and Jack to be doing anything on US soil, their agency doesn’t have that kind of status. And she’ll do whatever she has to to keep Mac from going back to prison for something like this. 

And apparently, if she keeps her mouth shut, no men in black are going to come for her either. She’s met Mac’s bosses in their real capacity this time, and Webber and Thornton are terrifying. But they’re also surprisingly kind. Or not so surprising, given that they sprang a convicted terrorist from prison on the belief he was innocent, and protected him and gave him a job. They bent the rules for Mac, and it seems they’re willing to bend them for her. But she’s also very certain that if she doesn’t keep her mouth shut, there will be no mercy. 

“What about _ Phantom of the Opera _?”

“Penny, none of our cast can _ sing. _” 

“Oh. Right.” She sits down and picks up the menu. “Okay, then, on a scale of one to our theater putting on a musical, how adventurous are we feeling tonight?”

“As long as it’s not still alive, I’m game.” 

* * *

OVERSIGHT’S OFFICE

THE MOMENT OF TRUTH

“Mac, I’ve known you for three years. And I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m never going to understand how you can do something as normal and simple as go to a play, and in the process take down an international terrorist who’s eluded capture for a decade.” Patty leans on her desk. “I was advised to insist on your taking a personal leave of absence, for at least six months.” She shakes her head. “I’m honestly a little afraid of what might occur if I did.” 

“I understand that given the circumstances, it looks like I’m not ready for the field…”

“In all honesty, Mac, you should never have gone into the field at all. When we hired you, there were more than enough reasons to keep you in the labs. But you proved yourself, and I saw no reason to stop you from doing what you were clearly skilled at.” Patty glances at a paper on her desk, Mac can see his original mug shot clipped to it, like the file Jack had in that room back in prison. Maybe it _ is _ that file.

“And I’m capable of doing that again.” Mac meets Patty’s eyes. “I understand that there are some concerns with the reports from medical about the brain injuries…”

“Which is exactly why I’d like you to take two more weeks of leave. After which, if you haven’t changed your mind, I will reinstate you with full clearance to field agent status. If, and only if, you agree to complete physical evaluations after every mission for the first year or until medical staff deems otherwise. Any head injury will bench you immediately, no matter what the status of the operation. If your condition worsens, you will be re-evaluated accordingly.”

Mac nods. “I understand.”

“Clearly, you’ve proven that you’re capable of performing under field conditions. Welcome back to the Phoenix, Agent MacGyver.”


	3. Bozer+Booze+Back to School

###  303-Bozer+Booze+Back to School

NIGERIA

THIS IS A WORKING VACATION

“Okay, who can tell me what the difference between a hydrophilic and a hydrophobic molecule is?” Mac asks. Hands shoot up across the room, and Mac finally calls on a girl with a red headscarf and a huge gap of missing front teeth in her smile. “Yes, Daraja?”

“Hydrophilic means it attaches to water. Hydrophobic means it goes away from water.” She’s probably barely seven, but she’s got a brilliant mind and Mac has taken to including her in the lessons he would have directed at the teenagers.  _ She’s a little like Val.  _ Mac has always thought kids are smarter than most people give them credit for, and that talking down to them is a terrible teaching tactic. 

“And who can tell me what has both kinds?”

There’s a chorus of “Soap!” from the room. 

“Yes! And...I think it’s time for us to go see what the special properties of soap let it do,” Mac says, holding up a bowl. “Which one of you thinks you can blow the biggest bubble in the class?” Even more hands shoot up. “Good, because you’re going to make your own bubble wand now. Go find a green stick you can bend into a loop, and then once everyone’s made theirs, we’re going to test them. Okay?”

The kids scatter out the door, and Mac lets out a breath. He’s spent his last two weeks of mandatory leave here in Nigeria, finally taking Nasha up on her offer to have him come teach the kids for a while. Being here, away from the chaos of the city, has been good. His hands haven’t been shaking as much the last few days, and the sunlight isn’t giving him blinding headaches any longer. There’s no guarantee that the smog and glare of LA won’t bring that back, or that the stress of the job won’t start the tremors again, but it at least feels like progress. 

“They love you,” Nasha says, grinning from where she was sitting in a corner listening to the whole thing. “Dara is thrilled with all this. Science is her fascination, I can’t get new books fast enough to keep her satisfied.”

“She’s brilliant,” Mac says. “And with a teacher and role model like you, she’s going to go far.” 

Nasha blushes. “I’m not nearly as good a teacher for her as you.”

“I can teach her the mechanics of science. You can teach her that her dreams are possible.” Mac smiles. “You went to college, you proved that she can do that too. That she doesn’t have to let coming from a small village or being a girl stop her from being brilliant.” 

They follow the kids outside, where most of them are still running around searching for small twigs. Mac looks over at the well pump. “Everything still working?”

“Yes. We fixed the pump last month, and it has not had a problem since.” 

“I’m sorry I wasn’t there to help.”

“I understand, you are a busy man.” He knows she’s being kind, she can at least guess at the truth he’s not allowed to tell her. 

“It was...I wasn’t in any place to help anyone for a while.” He can’t tell her exactly what happened, there’s too much of the Phoenix and its work bound up in that. But he knows she’s seen the shadows in his eyes, and the way Jack hovers. She noticed his brokenness once, and he’s sure she’s seen it again. 

“I’m sorry you were hurting.” She rests a hand on his arm. “I know there are things you cannot tell me, and I respect that. But sometimes it helps those who have been wounded to talk about their pain. It is like a wound, and sometimes it must be reopened before it can heal.”

Mac nods. He can see Solomon’s daughter out with the rest of the class, and he wonders how she’s healing, how she’s learning to process the trauma of her abduction and of being used as a child soldier. If she has Nasha to talk to, though, she’s in good hands. 

“It’s not the same, as before,” he ventures. “This time, I...I didn’t just give in. I fought back. It seems different that way.”

Nasha nods. “I can tell. You still jump when you are touched, but you seem prepared to fight, not run. It is not the same as I remember.” She smiles. “I have seen others, who come home from the wars or the cities the same. They grow stronger. And they learn to defend not only themselves, but others.” 

Mac nods. “I like that.” He hears a familiar cadence of boots on sand, and turns around to see Jack hurrying up. “What happened?”

“Matty called on the sat phone. Said our pilot’s ready to leave when we are.” Mac nods. They couldn’t keep the jet, they’d just joined a Phoenix team on their way to Kenya and got dropped off en-route. And their departure’s already been delayed for two days due to a situation that tied up the Africa exfil team in the Congo. But when they get back, Mac’s going to have his field test, and then… 

_ And then I’ll be back in the field for the first time since...since Murdoc. _ He can’t let himself be afraid of that name. Bozer jokingly said something about Voldemort and fear of a name only making you more afraid of the thing itself, but it’s true.  _ Murdoc doesn’t get to win. He doesn’t get to make me afraid of him, not any more. _

“Okay, I just have one lesson to finish up.” Mac turns back to the kids. “Who’s ready to make some bubbles?”

* * *

LOS ANGELES

THIS ISN’T A RESTAURANT

Riley takes the sandwich Billy hands her as he climbs back into the car, and starts peeling off the paper. Some of the pulled pork is sticking to the wrapper, and she licks it off, not caring that she looks like a five year old.  _ I always figured my dates were just gonna have to get used to my weird side.  _ “So, when you said you'd be in town and you wanted to see me I didn't think you meant a stakeout.”

“I know. My bad. But it's nice to have backup.”

“Oh, so I'm backup?” Riley says, shaking her head. 

“Super sexy backup.”

Her mouth is too full of pulled pork to formulate a proper comeback.  _ Momma’s food is amazing, even packed all the way across the country in a cooler in the car trunk.  _ “Mm-hmm.” 

There’s a thump on the window that makes her jump, spilling barbecued pork into her lap. “Damn it!” She looks up to see a familiar face. She rolls down her window. “Jack, what are you doing here?”

“Hey, we had an agreement. Same time, same place, once a week: Skee-Ball and pizza. Okay? I know I was just in Nigeria for two weeks, but that doesn’t negate our little deal. You were a no-show. I got worried.”  _ After what happened to Mac, he’s helicopter parenting us both. A lot. _ And Riley knows she’s missing their father-daughter time, but she did try to tell him...“So I had one of the many nerds in the lab trace your cell phone.”

Billy sighs. “Sorry, Jack. That's my bad. I asked Riley to hang with me.”

“It's not your fault, Billy. Jack, I  _ tried _ to leave you a message, but someone's voicemail was full.” She doesn’t mention that it’s mostly old calls from Mac that Jack never deleted the whole time they were searching.  _ I’d catch him replaying them, just listening to the sound of Mac’s voice. From back when things were okay. When he sounded happy. _ She stole Jack’s phone once to listen to them, but she broke down after the one where a sleep-deprived sounding Mac was ranting about fluid dynamics and Star Wars spaceships.  _ I couldn’t stand thinking we might never hear him that happy again.  _ Or that they might never hear him again at all. “And I texted you. Which you never opened.”

“Oh, okay. I'm sorry.” Jack leans on the open window edge. “So what’s Boba Fett taking you to that’s better than Skee-Ball and pizza?”

“We're following a skip.” Riley’s looked over the dossier Billy had on the guy, he sounds like what she might have been if the CIA hadn’t picked her up. A hacker who’s knocked over a few banks, then escalated to placing ransomware on the Atlanta traffic control offices’ computers. That earned him a hefty bounty on his head, and the Coltons on his tail. 

Billy’s phone pings, on the console, and he picks it up. “Uh-oh. Change of plans. Looks like Mama got a tip that he's headed to a house downtown.”

“Okay, well, you two be careful out there. You sure you don’t want me to tag along?” Jack asks.

“It’s one guy, I think the two of us can handle it,” Billy says.

“Okay, I see. I don’t wanna be the third wheel here. Ain’t nothin’ cool about a tricycle. I’ll stop horning in on your date…”

“It’s not a date.” Riley’s been steering clear of putting that label on her relationship with Billy.  _ We both promised we wouldn’t make it a serious thing right now. That we’d be okay if the whole long distance thing didn’t work out. _ If they don’t make it a big deal, it can’t really hurt if it ends. Right?

Her phone is the next to buzz. “Um, it looks like I’m the one with the change of plans now. Matty wants me to come back to work.” Jack nods, he must have gotten the same message. “Sorry, Billy.”

“No problem. I’ll let you know how it goes, Riley.” She steps out of his car and climbs into Jack’s GTO.

“What did you mean that wasn’t a date?” Jack asks as he drives them back toward Phoenix. 

“We’re just testing things out right now. This is the first time I’ve seen Billy in person in...months.” They met up briefly when the team followed a lead on Murdoc in Atlanta, but there wasn’t really time for more than combing piles of intel looking for a trace of Murdoc or Mac. “We haven’t really talked about what our expectations are or anything.”

“Riley, I know you’re being cautious. But dancing around the edges of this is just gonna hurt you too.” Jack sighs. “You like him, he likes you, that’s a date.”

“And you’re okay with that?” Riley asks. She knows Jack thinks she can do better than a bounty hunter, who he calls Boba Fett on a VERY regular basis. 

“It doesn’t matter what I’m okay with, it matters what you’re okay with. I’m not saying he’s everything I wanted for you, but he seems like a decent guy, and the important thing is that  _ you _ feel like you can trust him,” Jack says. “But for the sake of everyone’s sanity, you need to talk to him and figure out what you are to each other. Take it from me, that’s the only way a relationship is gonna survive in this business.” 

“So how are you and Mom doing?”

“Well, considering I’ve been out of the country for the past two weeks, pretty good. I was gonna take her out tomorrow night, but unless we wrap up this op in record time, we’ll have to push it back.” He shakes his head. “Fortunately, she’s okay with it.” 

Riley nods, then looks out the window. As much as she hates to admit it, Jack is right. She needs to stop dancing around the realities and face them. Because no matter what she tells herself, she’s already made her choice. And it won’t hurt any less if this ends, no matter what name she gives it. 

* * *

Jack’s glad to see Mac already in the War Room. At least one of his kids had their whereabouts accounted for. He knows Riley was fine, knew that when she wasn’t at their normal meeting. But the last time one of his kids disappeared…

He shakes off the thought and tries to focus on what Matty is saying. “In the last 48 hours, two bombs, both made from transparent explosives, detonated in Morocco.”

Mac looks up sharply, fingers twisting a paperclip, into what, Jack can’t see. “I thought transparent explosives were still in the theoretical phase.” It’s kind of scary to hear Mac of all people surprised by something like this. Then again, anything that’s happened in the last few months surprises him. Jack’s glad that for the most part, Mac’s memory is back, and that his last brain scan, after they got back from Nigeria, showed more improvement than the doctors had even been hoping for. Mac is resilient. His kid can bounce back from this, if anyone can. 

“Oh, I'd say we're well beyond the theoretical phase, Mac. The first bomb took out a weapons manufacturing plant. The second destroyed a government training facility.”

“Okay, for those of us who aren't experts in kaboom, what are transparent explosives?” Bozer asks. 

“Uh, transparent bombs are cutting-edge explosives. They're made from thin, see-through, volatile material that can be molded to cover any object.” Mac going on one of his science rambles makes Jack happier than he’ll admit.  _ That big brain of his might have got knocked around, but he can still use it. _ He knows Mac would have been devastated to have permanently lost that piece of himself. 

“A-plus, blondie.” Matty pulls up another set of images. “Two weeks ago, three labs at three different science and tech firms were broken into. The material stolen, when combined, gave the thieves everything they needed to build the world's first two transparent bombs.”

“Well, do we have any suspects?” Leanna, ever the practical one, asks. 

“Meet Kyle, Caroline, and Nick.” The photos of the kids look like any other all-American college students. “All three were students at Western Tech. After graduation, each went to work for one of the three R & D firms that was just robbed.”

“So these three are working together?” Jack asks. 

“No. It doesn’t look like there’s been any communication between them. And this is where it gets strange. They all graduated different years, and as far as we can tell, they never crossed paths at school or after.”

“How do three people who have never come in contact with each other manage to build a high-tech bomb together?” Bozer asks. 

Riley answers for Matty. “Forty-eight hours before the thefts took place, all three received emails giving them the green light to proceed with their mission.” 

“So someone's recruiting sleeper agents out of Western Tech,” Mac says. Jack sees a small shiver go down the kid’s spine. 

“It appears so. And we have no idea who, because after Caroline, Kyle, and Nick completed their task, all three were murdered.”

Jack shakes his head.  _ Not surprising, in this kind of thing, but still.  _

“Damn. That's just cold,” Bozer says quietly. 

“None of these students seem like the type to betray their country, so how did they get recruited?” Mac asks. He’s chewing on his lower lip obsessively, and Jack can see his fingers moving to circle the burn scars on his arm, faded but still rough.  _ He seemed like the last person who could do something like that. And then James took advantage of his amnesia and made him build a bomb that could have killed Jill. _ He knows Mac is seeing himself in those kids’ shoes. 

“Maybe these three, at first, thought that they were being recruited into a collegiate secret society. Like Yale's Skull and Bones,” Bozer suggests. 

Matty nods. “The only thing we know for sure about whoever's pulling the strings is that they're sending e-mails from the Western Tech campus, which is why, as of a half an hour ago, you, Leanna, Mac, and Riley have been accepted as transfer students to Western Tech. Congratulations.”

“Wait, so let me get this straight. We're going back to college?” Bozer asks. 

“That's correct, Bozer. But let me be clear. This is not about keg stands or rush parties. The four of you are going undercover to smoke out a skilled handler who's building an army of domestic terrorists.” Mac flinches at the words, and Jack walks up a little closer to put a hand on the kid’s shoulder. Mac takes a shaky breath at first, but eventually relaxes into the touch.  _ He’s getting better at knowing it’s me and that I won’t hurt him.  _

“Are we clear?” Matty asks. 

There’s a chorus of “Yes, ma'am.”

“And me?” Jack asks.

“I’ve spoken to the leader of their ROTC detachment, and it seems they’re in need of another recruiter.” Jack nods curtly. As long as he’s around to keep an eye on Mac, he’ll be happy. The last time he wasn’t there and Mac went undercover at college, he almost died. Jack isn’t going to find it easy to forget finding his kid shivering inside that freezer at MIT. He can’t let anything else happen to Mac. He just can’t. 

* * *

WESTERN TECH

MAC COULD GET LOST ON THIS CAMPUS

Mac hasn’t been to Western Tech for a long time. He took a few night classes here, but once he started getting serious about the whole vigilante thing, he just didn’t have the time to keep up with them. He’s glad no one asked too many questions about why he was just now returning. And his name isn’t exactly a common one; quite a few people around here probably know about the whole domestic terrorism thing, it was all over the papers. But somehow Matty managed to get him past the administration without a lot of messiness about his former conviction. 

Bozer is practically skipping across the lawn. “Man. This is dope. Like, really dope.”

“Think he's excited?” Riley says. 

“Maybe a tad,” Leanna chuckles. “Pace yourself, Bozer.”

“Are you okay, Mac?” Riley asks. Clearly, his agitation isn’t as well hidden as he wishes it was.  _ No one is going to make a big deal out of anything. They’re too busy to worry about who you are, or were. _ But he’s dreading walking into a classroom, sitting down, and having a prof get to his name on the list and making it a big deal. Or worse, acting like he’s a threat.

“It's just weird being on a college campus. Last time I was at one, it didn’t end well.” Mac tries not to think about getting locked in the MIT lab freezer. He shivers, even though the sun is warm. “I took some night classes from here, a long time ago, but then...I didn’t really have the chance to take classes in a supermax.” Somehow talking about having been in prison doesn’t seem as bad anymore. Not after Murdoc. But he still doesn’t like the thought of that part of his past dragged out in the open and made fair game for anyone vicious enough to attack that as his weak point.

“I never went to college either,” Riley says, looking around. “Spy school straight out of high school. Not that I regret it. I don’t think the whole dorm and party scene was for me.” 

Mac nods. That’s another thing he’s scared of. College campuses are an all too common scene for sexual assaults, and while he fully plans on staying with his team, unpredictable things happen.  _ I’m just jumpy, after everything. The ‘if it happened once it’ll happen again’ is setting in again. _ He’s already made up his mind that if he sees anything the least bit sketchy while he’s here, he’s breaking it up. Even if he blows his cover to do it. He won’t let that happen to someone else. 

“Well, I loved college,” Bozer says. “Some of the best years of my life.”

Leanna shakes her head. “You went to film school, Bozer. That definitely doesn't count.” 

“It does too! I spent my days developing my art. And meeting other people who loved the same thing I did!” Bozer says expansively. “College is for finding your tribe. The people who just ‘get’ you.” 

“What about you, Leanna?” Riley asks. 

“Uh, you mean Ms. Track Scholarship?” Bozer asks. 

“You say that like it's a bad thing,” Leanna says with a small smile.

Mac knows why. Bozer turned down a chance at a real college degree so that Deja would have a shot at making it into her paramedic training.  _ He knew there would only be enough money to get one of them a degree, and he sacrificed for his sister.  _ Even with her own scholarship, Deja had scraped by, working after Mama Bozer passed away just to pay her way and avoid falling deeper into student debt. 

“Not bad, just boring. Weren't you studying all the time?” 

“Yeah. Because I had to keep up my GPA. Not a ton of time for parties. Just me, my books, and a lot of coffee.”

“Who said anything about parties?” Bozer asks. “All I know is, we didn’t see many student athletes at the student film festivals. You guys missed all the real cultural experiences.” He laughs. “Aw, I'm joking.”

“What do you say we make up for that right now and try to get expelled on our first day?” Riley asks, nodding toward the building that houses the main campus servers.  _ This should be fun… _

* * *

Bozer peeks up from behind the bushes outside the university’s server building.  _ This feels like being in a spy movie.  _

“Bozer, stop doing that.” Riley tugs him back down. “You look suspicious. Leanna’s watching the security cams, she’ll tell us when we’re clear.” 

Just then, Leanna’s voice comes in over comms. “Clear to enter.” Mac jumps up and pries off the casing over the card reader outside the door, shorting it out with his knife. He pulls open the door and they walk in, turning down a hallway. 

Leanna continues giving directions. “Take your next left. The server room should be just down the stairs.” Bozer nods. “Wait, guys, stop. Two rubber guns about to round the corner.”  _ Wow, those guards move fast.  _

Mac pushes Riley back behind a wall. “Here, get to cover. Um, we'll create a distraction. You get to the server room.”

“Distraction?” Bozer asks. Mac glances at the trash and recycling bins behind them, and Bozer has a pretty good idea of the kind of distraction he’s thinking. “Dude, no, let’s not get that drastic. I have a plan.” 

He bursts out from behind the corner just as the two guards walk up, glancing back at Mac like he has no idea they’re about to get caught. “Dude! We did it.”

“Hey, you two!” The closest guard shouts. “What are you guys doing here? This is a secure building.” One of the guards glares at them, the other looks like he’s ready to throw them out the nearest window. 

“Pledge chair's gonna be pissed. I told you this was a bad idea,” Bozer says. It’s his job to salvage situations with a good story, and he can already see that Mac’s in no position to be coming up with any excuses himself.  _ Just go with me on this one, and we’ll get outta here.  _

Thankfully, Mac does, maybe it’s the fact that it’s just security guards and not police officers that’s keeping him from going full-blown panic mode. “Oh, you told me? When was that? Before or after you said we’d definitely beat all the other pledges’ tasks?” 

“You're the one who bragged he could get into any building on campus.” 

“And guess what? I did. We're inside.” 

Bozer watches Mac flinch as one of the guards slams a meaty hand on his shoulder, fingers digging in. He wants to yell at this guy to stop being so rough, but he doesn’t dare make this worse. 

“You kids stay outta here.” Bozer can see Mac starting to shake and breathe faster.  _ He’s had less control over his panic attacks lately.  _ He’s pretty sure in the next couple minutes Mac is going to either start fighting to get away, or crying. 

“I can't wait for pledge season to be over. Let's go.”

Mac looks so small, cringing away from the hands forcing him toward the door. Bozer flinches.  _ He shouldn’t be back in the field yet. _ Mac had insisted, and Bozer knows if they’d forcibly suspended him he would have been miserable (and possibly blown up the house by now), but Mac definitely hasn’t had enough time to deal with the trauma from Murdoc. It took months after he got out of prison for him to let Bozer hug him for longer than a couple seconds.  _ He shouldn’t have been in the field then either.  _

Bozer knows this is where Mac feels most at home, this is where he feels like he’s doing the most good. But part of him thinks Mac would be better off without the Phoenix.  _ Even though they got him out of prison, it’s because of his job that Murdoc kidnapped him.  _ Bozer’s worked hard to get over his resentment about the deal Phoenix gave Mac. About how they only freed him because they needed his help. And sure, eventually, it became about a lot more than just a pragmatic deal, but it’s at moments like this that Bozer wishes the agency would have helped free Mac out of nothing more than the goodness of their heart, and then left him alone. 

Once they’re out the doors, Bozer turns to Mac. Mac’s still shaking, fists clenched at his sides. Bozer takes a deep breath, wishing Jack was here.  _ But he’s still at the recruitment table in the cafeteria. _

The truth is, Bozer’s been feeling less and less able to help Mac lately.  _ I always feel so...lost around him.  _ He’s felt like that ever since Mac went to prison, honestly.  _ There’s so much in his life I can’t relate to, now, and it makes me feel like I’m not the right person to be there for him anymore. _ It’s why he moved out when Jack moved in.  _ Jack is better at dealing with how distraught Mac gets.  _ Bozer just feels helpless.  _ All I can see is my best friend, my little brother, broken and miserable. _ And he freezes, he never knows what to say or do. Half the time he tries to make it better and only makes it worse. 

“Mac, they’re gone. Riley’s inside, she’ll be fine.” He rubs a hand gently over Mac’s shaking arm, and jumps when his hand is shoved away with a violent force. 

“They didn’t have to do that!” Bozer still isn’t used to Mac’s sudden surges of anger. It’s so utterly unlike the Mac he remembers. He flinches, and then sighs when Mac cowers.  _ Great. You made him feel ashamed of himself.  _ He knows Mac can’t control this, and he wants to kick himself for reacting to it. “Why did they…” Mac’s anger just as quickly is replaced by the confused pain of a wounded child. “Why were they pushing us? We would have left, they didn’t have to.”

“I guess they were just frustrated. And mad we snuck past their doors.” He has to keep Mac calm, and he’s afraid he’ll fail. These mood swings are so new. And no one knows if they’re permanent. Any time Mac is stressed (which sadly is an all too common occurrence), he might either get irrationally angry or start crying, or both. It’s strange to see the usual control and compartmentalization of his emotions shatter like that. 

Bozer knew there could be brain damage from his head injuries, but he’s always thought of that in terms of trouble communicating or maybe even that Mac wouldn’t be able to do his mental science and math anymore. He didn’t expect it to be out of whack emotions and hand tremors.  _ Goes to show how much I know.  _

Mac takes a deep, shuddering breath. “I’m sorry, Boze.” 

“Nothing to be sorry for, Mac.” He knows Mac is doing better than anyone expected. That his recovery to this point is nothing short of a miracle.  _ They didn’t think he was going to come back from that nonverbal phase he was in for a while, and he did. They didn’t think he’d be able to come back to field work, and yet he passed all the tests, the same tests any other agent takes, that I took.  _ But Bozer selfishly wants the old Mac back, the way he was. The way Bozer could relate to him. 

He’s used to Mac getting lost in his own head, to the way he’ll just...ignore people when he’s focused on a project. And that threw him off at first too. He’s sure in time, he’ll get used to this new version of Mac. But it hurts to see, right now.  _ _

By the time Riley and Leanna sneak over to the agreed-upon meeting spot outside a dorm that’s being renovated, Mac seems to have his emotions under control, and Bozer is feeling less horrible about all of this. 

He’s even feeling good enough to tell an exaggerated story of the events to Leanna, even though she saw it all on video anyway. “Then this Terry Crews-looking dude grabbed me, and I think he bruised my clavicle.” He glances at his upper arm.

Leanna pokes his shoulder. “That's your clavicle.”

“Were you able to access the server room?” Mac asks Riley. He’s bending a paperclip into the shape of a graduation cap. 

“Yeah. I hard-lined in and confirmed Matty was right. Whoever's been sending these recruitment e-mails is definitely on this campus. But that's where the good news ends.” Riley sighs, twisting a strand of hair around her fingers in the way she always does when she’s stressed. 

“So you couldn't identify them?” Bozer asks.

“No. Digitally, there's no way to track them. More bad news: I found more emails.”

“How many more?” Leanna asks. 

“About three dozen. Each one mobilizing a former student to either steal bomb components or carry out an attack.”

“So those two transparent bombs weren't an isolated event,” Mac says quietly. 

“No, not even close. Someone's been recruiting students from this campus and turning them into terrorists for years.”

* * *

DORM ROOM

BETTER THAN SOME

Riley shakes her head as Bozer reaches for Leanna’s book, pulling it out of her hands. “Uh, what are you doing?” 

“Well, I  _ was _ studying. I have a paper due in two days.” Leanna says.  _ The suckiest part of this op is having to actually go to classes.  _ Riley’s in a computer science track, which is fine, but she has added credits in English and economics that are gonna kick her butt if she can’t focus on them. And she can’t, because she has an op to run. 

“Are you serious? We're gonna be done with this op in two days.”

“You don't know that. We could be digging into this spy ring for weeks, and being undercover means blending in. Which means studying.” 

Riley winces as the pounding bass that’s been the soundtrack to her email searching suddenly gets much stronger. “ Is that music getting louder?” 

“I think so,” Mac says, grimacing.  _ With his head, it must be killing him. _ She saw on his new medical file that loud noises and bright lights are possible migraine triggers. 

“Blending in means enjoying  _ life, _ ” Bozer says with a chuckle. “Three a.m. movie marathons, coffee with my absolutely gorgeous girlfriend in the student lounge, checking out the film students’ work…”

“And where does passing our classes and not getting kicked out of school fit into this little dream life, exactly?” Leanna asks. “How about we get coffee, and study  _ together? _ ”

“I think I can handle that.” 

Riley finishes her work and hits send. “Okay, Matty, upload's complete. You have all the emails we found.”

“These emails go back a decade.”

“What did you say?” Leanna asks, as the music cranks up even louder. Mac visibly cringes, forehead wrinkling in pain.  _ Okay. If it was just annoying me, I could take it. But this is practially a torture method now, and they’re hurting Mac. _

“That's it. I'm kicking someone's ass.” Riley jumps up out of her chair and heads for the door. 

“W-We're undercover. Just... I'm just saying…” Mac says placatingly, but Riley isn’t paying attention. 

She follows the sound down the hallway to the second room from the stairs. Her own head hurts now; she’s only endured sonic torture once in her career, but she never wanted to expereince it again, and for months afterward she flinched when they passed a car with the radio cranked up. Even now, extremely loud music isn’t a comfortable experience. 

She pounds on the door, hoping she can be heard over the bass.

A guy with bleary eyes and a thick smell of alcohol coming from him yanks open the door, then grins hazily. “Hey, there. Uh, you look thirsty. Want to come inside for a drink?” 

Riley shakes her head, keeping a smile plastered on her face. “Tempting. But, uh, I have a test in about an hour. Do you guys think you could turn the music down a little bit so I can get some studying done?”

Past the door guy, she can see three others, two of whom are playing some kind of VR game, and a third who’s openly staring at her. All of them start to laugh, and then the one staring reaches over and cranks the stereo up even more. Riley winces.

“That's what the, uh, library's for,” Door Guy slurs over the music. 

“Yeah, as if you've ever been there,” One of his friends yells. 

“I've been there. Once. On a tour.” He turns back to Riley. “So, how about that brew?”

Riley slams the door, then leans on the wall in the hallway.  _ As good a time as ever to test the lab’s mini EMP.  _ A few seconds later, the only sound coming from the room is shouting.

When she walks back into her room, Leanna raises an eyebrow. “I take it that went well.”

“Remind me to lower all their GPAs when this is over.” She turns to Mac. “Unless they borrow someone else’s stereo, they won’t be bothering us again. He gives her a small, grateful nod.  _ They had a lot of expensive tech in there. And now it’s toast. _ She grins as she sits down at her computer again. 

There’s a knock at the door, and she starts to stand up.  _ Great, they’re gonna come yell at me even though they have no idea how I did that.  _

“I’ll get it,” Leanna says, standing up. 

The face at the door is, thankfully, unfamiliar. It’s a guy holding out a bunch of flyers. “Zeta Kappa Tau party tonight.”

“Hell, yeah. I'll take one of those,” Bozer says, pushing his way between Leanna and the guy, clearly trying to assert some possessiveness. Riley can’t blame him, this guy clearly liked what he saw when he opened the door. 

“I'm sorry. I just ran out.”

“You're literally holding a stack. Right there. I'm looking at 'em.” Bozer points to the papers, making a barrier with his arm in front of Leanna. 

The man ignores him. “You should come. Bring her.” He points to Riley, who mimes a ‘who, me?’ in his direction. “Not him.” He pushes Bozer backward and closes the door. 

“Very disrespectful,” Bozer grumbles. “Trying to steal another man’s girl? That’s against the bro code, dude?”

Riley sighs, turning back to her computer. “Sorry, Matty. You were saying?” 

“I was saying these emails go back to '08. Factoring this in, we uncovered that every time a message goes out, an attack happens less than 24 hours later.”

“Guys, we uncovered a pattern,” Leanna says, sounding a little breathless. 

“A pattern we could use to connect this ring to a decade's worth of unsolved bombings,” Matty says. “The recruiter has been at Western Tech at least that long, so it can't be a student. I've had our techs start looking into the profiles of every staff and faculty member there with this in mind.” 

“Okay. Let us know when you get something.” Riley leans back in her chair and pulls out her economics textbook.  _ Great. I’m so gonna fail this quiz. _

Matty’s voice crackles through her comms a few minutes later, making her jump and drop the book. “We've come up with a suspect. Elliot Lambeau, Professor of Material Science and Engineering.”

Mac stands up from where he’s been curled on the bed reading his own textbook, looking more like a high schooler than a college student. “Material science that means he'd have the, uh, knowledge and skill needed to make transparent bombs.”

Bozer points to the dossier that pops up on Riley’s screen. “And look, he's been arrested a dozen times since he started teaching here, at protests that turned violent.”

“ And a lot of the graduates involved in these attacks took his class over the years,” Leanna adds. “This has got to be our guy.”

“We should pay him a visit.” Riley hardly dares to hope it’ll be that easy.  _ Whoever this was escaped being found for the past ten years. _ Getting repeatedly arrested doesn’t seem to fit that M.O. But they can’t afford to ignore the possibility either. 

“He just started a lecture,” Matty says. “Mac, go sit in on his class and get a read on him.

The rest of you, go find me evidence he's our recruiter.”

* * *

PROFESSOR LAMBEAU’S CLASS

MAC IS VERY LATE

Mac pushes open the classroom door very slowly, hoping he’ll escape notice and be able to go take a seat before anyone sees him sneaking in. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. The door he opens is next to the professor’s desk. He cringes.

“Excuse me?” The voice stops Mac in his tracks. “Do you have a cell phone?” 

“Um...yeah. Should I leave it somewhere on a table?” He’s not even sure if it’s on silent, and he can’t afford to make another terrible impression on this guy. 

The professor shakes his head. “And on that phone on the top, right in the middle is what?” Mac flinches. The man sounds just like James. Demanding, controlling, and unwilling to be crossed. And like so many other times, Mac can’t come up with the right answer. His brain whirrs frantically and then stops altogether. 

“The answer I'm looking for is a  _ clock _ . So there was no reason for you to be thirty-two minutes late to my lecture, Mister...? 

“MacGyver.”

“Mm.” Mac flinches at the way the professor studies him after hearing his name.  _ He knows exactly who I am.  _ He waits for the inevitable question, for the man to humiliate him in front of this whole classroom by making some remark about his criminal past. “Come here. Come over here.” Mac walks up to the desk hesitantly. It’s too much like the times James punished him after he made a mistake. He doubts the professor is going to discipline him with a ruler or a belt, but words will cut just as deep. “Since you didn't think it was important to join us on time, I can only  _ assume _ that you've already mastered the engineering principles of slope stability.” Professor Lambeau reaches down, picks up a plastic tub full of sand, and sets it on his desk. “So, there is an object at the bottom of this box. I want you to retrieve it using those principles.”

Mac looks up.  _ I need him to want me to help him, if he is the recruiter. Which means I need to prove I live up to my reputation.  _ “Um...with all due respect, there's an easier way to do this.” He meets the man’s eyes as confidently as he can, then reaches down to unhook the compressed air tube from the back of the desk. “Using the principles of fluidization, I can "liquefy" the sand, which is a lot quicker than if I used the principles of slope stability.”

He pulls out his knife, bores a small hole in the side of the tub, and then shoves in the nozzle of the air tubing. A few seconds later, a rubber duck floats to the surface.

Lambeau nods, frowning. “Hmm. Well, that's certainly one way to do it. But it's not the correct way. Go take a seat.” Mac tries not to let the man’s words make him cower. He sits down, pulls a notebook and pencil out of his backpack, and starts twisting a paperclip into the shape of a rubber duck.

In the background, though his comms, he can hear Riley and Bozer and Leanna searching the man’s office, and he grins when he hears Bozer use what must be the magnet trick to keep an alarmed drawer from going off. He’s used that himself on some windows in the past, and Bozer independently learned about it for making a spy film, and got excited the first time he saw Mac do it in real life. 

He looks up when there’s a shuffle of papers and feet, and steps into a back corner. “Guys, Professor Lambeau's class just ended. Please tell me you're wrapping this up.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa. Hold on, hold on.” Riley’s voice has a trace of excitement. “I found something. He's got a hidden bank account.”

“Whoa. That's way more than even a tenured professor should be making,” Leanna says. 

Matty’s voice cuts in. “Could be the funding for his recruitment operation. Riley, can you source this money?” 

“Yeah, I can, but it's gonna take some time.”

Matty’s voice is calm. “Mac, stall him.” Mac nods, then realizes they can’t see him doing that.

“I will.” He picks up his books from his desk and starts down, all the other students have already left.  _ At least it looks like I was just waiting to talk to him alone.  _ “Professor, I'd like to apologize for being late to the lecture.”

“I appreciate that, Mr. MacGyver.” Lambeau picks up a stack of books, then turns to face Mac. “You know that was a pretty advanced trick you pulled. Most students barely have an answer, let alone show up the professor after being put on the spot in class.”

“I wasn't trying to show you up, but just...thinking outside of the box is kind of my thing.”

“Mm-hmm. So I’ve heard. If I’m not mistaken, you’re  _ Angus _ MacGyver, correct?” Mac nods. “You took a few classes from this department, several years ago. And then you were the talk of the school when you were arrested.” 

Mac flinches. 

“Oh, I don’t think there’s any reason to be ashamed of that. I’ve been the subject of similar gossip myself. And the way I hear it, you were working toward making the city a better place; not waiting for a cumbersome, corrupt government to act.” Mac nods slowly.  _ All of the protests he was in were for radical socialist causes. He believes in smashing the constructs of society and rebuilding it.  _

“I can’t just sit back when I see something wrong.” Mac says, taking another step closer. “When the world gets twisted, when everything is out of place, it’s up to the people who can take action, to put it right.” 

“You know, you’re much brighter than many of my students. Not content to accept the status quo. Willing to risk it all for something better.” 

Mac nods again.  _ Maybe I’ll even get a confession out of him.  _ And then Mac hears someone yelp, through his comms, a muffled curse, and then a buzzing from Lambeau’s pocket.  _ The magnet must have fallen off the latch Bozer touched and set off the alarm.  _

“We're gonna have to pick this up on Monday,” Lambeau says hurriedly, reaching into his pocket for his phone. 

“Uh, it would be great if I could ask you a few more questions,” Mac says, trying desperately to keep the man’s attention. 

“Well, um no, I really I have to go.”

“It would be better if you stayed.” The man turns around, and swings a microscope at Mac’s head. He only just manages to duck.  _ Damn it, I do NOT need that again. _ Lambeau runs for the door, but Mac grabs up a small torch from a shelf, lights it, and then flings it at the wall beside the door. There’s a bang, and Lambeau falls down, apparently unconscious. 

“Mac, was that an explosion?” Matty asks. 

“Uh, yeah. Lambeau tried to make a run for it.” Mac flinches. That reaction was pure instinct, but it was also dangerous.  _ I could have badly injured him. I’m definitely going to get myself in trouble if anyone overheard.  _ He takes a deep, shaky breath.  _ I need to get a grip on these act-before-I-think moments, before someone gets hurt.  _ It’s been happening more lately, like all he knows is still in his head, and still gets used, but he can’t always think fast enough to control  _ how  _ it’s used. 

“I said stall him, not stun him.” 

“I know, I’m sorry.” Mac takes another shaking breath. “But is he our guy? He was acting shady. Tried to hit me with a microscope.” 

Riley sighs over comms. “Well, there's a reason for that. He is guilty, just not of recruiting sleeper agents. He's been embezzling department funds to funnel to his radical causes.” He hears something click, like a computer closing. “Bozer’s magnet fell off the drawer and set the alarm off. He must have realized someone was in his office, and realized you were trying to stall him.” 

“So we're back at square one.” Mac leans back, looking away from the scorch mark on the wall.  _ I am going to get expelled.  _ He needs to get out of here before someone comes looking, not that it matters. Lambeau knows who he is if he decides to try and press charges. 

“Actually, it's worse than that,” Riley says. “While we were looking into Lambeau, I just got another alert. Our recruiter just sent out another email.”

“Which means something's going down in the next twenty-four hours.” Mac whispers.  _ Well, at least I might not have to worry about getting charged with assault.  _

* * *

Bozer leans on the bunk bed, trying to get his best friend to look at him. “Mac, Riley anonymously leaked all of that information about Lambeau’s embezzling to the administration. He’s gonna get arrested, and I doubt they’re going to listen to him ranting about a student who threw a blowtorch at him.” 

“But I did it.” Mac’s voice is sullen and pained. “I didn’t even really think. I could have killed him if I did that wrong.” He rolls over on the bed, a blanket pulled up around his shoulders. He was acting like he was in shock when he got back to the room, shivering and stumbling, so Bozer told him to lie down for a while. 

“You didn’t, though.”

“But I could have.” Mac whispers. “Maybe everyone was right. Maybe it’s too dangerous for me to be in the field. I’m doing things without even thinking…”

“Yeah, because they’re just intrinsically part of who you are. And I know that the biggest piece of you that’s buried down in there is the softhearted guy who didn’t want to squish a cockroach. Come on, Mac. That gentle part of you is even deeper than all your nerdy science knowledge. You couldn’t hurt someone. You couldn’t let yourself. You knew what you were doing, whether you were aware of it or not.” 

Mac nods shakily, and starts to get up, swinging his legs over the side of the bed. There’s a knock at the door, and Leanna opens it. “Oh, come in.” Jack walks in, it’s strange to see him in his camo gear. He must have been required to wear it for the recruiting table.

“Jack. Is it ever a relief to see you!” Bozer says. 

“Dude, can I not leave you kids alone for four hours?” Jack grumbles. “Mac, what’s this I hear about you blowin’ something up?” He stops when he catches sight of how badly Mac is shaking and the blanket still wrapped around his shoulders. “Awww kiddo, what’s wrong?”

“Scared myself,” Mac admits weakly. Jack sits down beside him, putting an arm around Mac’s shoulders. Bozer can’t hear what he‘s saying, but Mac is leaning into Jack’s comfort, and he looks a little more relaxed. 

Just then, Riley calls everyone over to where she’s sitting on her computer. “Matty wants to talk to us.” 

Bozer can barely look the woman in the eyes even on the video screen. He doesn’t know why, why it feels like his fault they went after the wrong person. But he’s willing to bet everyone in the room feels the same. “All right, people, tell me we ID'd the student that received the recruiter's latest email.”

Riley shakes her head. The closest I can get is pinpointing the hub on the network where the email was opened.”

“Which should lead us to a dorm, which would help us narrow down our suspects,” Leanna says. 

“There. I got a physical address.” Riley pulls up the map and pinpoints the spot.

“Which dorm is it?” Mac asks. 

“That's not a dorm. That's the Zeta Kappa Tau frat house,” Riley says.

Matty nods. “Most likely, our email recipient is a member of that frat. So, if we can identify them, it may lead us to whoever sent the email.”

“The Zetas have 16 members. Any one of 'em could have received that email.” Jack says. 

“It’s better than a dorm,” Mac offers, rather unhelpfully. 

“Yeah, but how do we figure out which frat brother is the right brother?” 

“We just need to find the one with this email on his computer,” Riley says. “Right now, it’s just a random string of gibberish, and I have a decryption algorithm running on it to try and crack it, but most likely the recipient has the decryption key. So our best chance of learning anything from it is to find them.”

“Easier said than done,” Leanna says. “We can't just waltz to the front door and expect to get private time alone with all sixteen computers.”

Bozer reaches for a paper that’s been tossed aside on Riley’s desk. “Actually, we can.” He holds up the flyer for the party. “Tonight, the house'll be packed. Should give Riley enough cover to slip in and search the computers.”

“It'll give us all enough cover,” Riley says, looking up. “You guys can help me search.

All we have to do is plug one of these into each computer. I can program these to auto-run a search for the recruiter's email. The LED will glow red for "no" and green if it finds the email.” 

“How long is that gonna take?” Jack asks. 

“To program them, maybe half an hour tops.”

“Good, cause you all better be ready to party by ten.” He frowns. “I’ll skip out on the ROTC event tonight, come keep an eye on you guys.” 

“You don’t have to. I doubt our frat boy is gonna be in any condition to give us too much trouble,” Leanna says. 

“I still want to be there.” Jack still has his arm around Mac’s shoulders, and Bozer can only guess what’s going through the man’s head.  _ Not that he could have done anything if he’d been free, he couldn’t walk into that class like Mac could.  _ But he still doesn’t want to let Mac out of his sight. And Bozer doesn’t think that’s such a bad idea.

* * *

ZETA KAPPA TAU HOUSE

NOT AS GOOD OF A TIME AS ADVERTISED

Mac can’t fathom the appeal of frat parties. There are too many people, the music is too loud, and the lights hurt his eyes and head. He feels hungover and he isn’t even drunk.  _ Then again, it’s probably my PTSD and head injury talking.  _ He’d be willing to bet most of the kids in here probably aren’t as messed up as he is, at least not in that particular way. 

He pushes his way through the crowd, trying to avoid as much physical contact as he can, and finds a spot by a wall that’s not too chaotic.  _ I just need a few minutes to breathe and process and get used to it, then I’ll be good to go. _

But it doesn’t look like he’s going to be left to himself. Two girls, in crop tops and cutoffs that show far too much skin to make Mac feel comfortable about their intentions, walk up, moving in beside him, one on each side. 

“What’s the matter? Didn’t see anything you like out there?” One of them asks.

“I...uh, I’m just here with friends, I’m not looking for…”

“Hey, loosen up.” The taller girl shoves a red plastic cup into his hand. “Tonight’s for having fun.”

Mac pushes away the offered drink. He can smell the alcohol it it, strong and bitter. “I...uh..I have a test tomorrow. I can’t afford a hangover.” 

“Oh, come  _ on, _ it’s too early in the semester to be worried about grades.” The girl slides her arm through his, and Mac shudders. He pushes her fingers away. “Come on, have some fun. You look like you need to have a good time.” She reaches for the top button of his shirt.

Mac jerks away, hand going to his collar instinctively. He can’t let her see the scars. And the feel of her fingers on his clothes was viscerally horrifying. “I don’t want to.” 

He doesn’t understand why they won’t leave him alone, but they’re probably drunk, and possibly also high. He has to get away from them, or he’s going to have a panic attack, and then he’s really going to be in trouble. 

The shorter girl grabs his hand and pulls him toward the chaos of the party in the main room. He tries to pull away, but she’s insistent and if he makes a scene he’ll draw attention to himself. He just wants to get away from her, away from all of this. Right now. The music is loud and the lights are making his head ache. Nothing about this place is putting him at ease in any way. He catches sight of a couple in a corner and turns away, only to have someone tighten a hand in his hair and pull him down. The next second, the girl who was pulling him around has smashed her lips against his, they taste like alcohol and peach. Mac pulls away, coughing and shaking his head, pushing her away from him in a blind panic.

“What the hell, dude?” the girl asks. “What do you not like about me? Are you freaking  _ gay? _ ” She asks, her voice rising. “Is that it? That’d be just my luck.” Mac steps back, trying to melt into the crowd.  _ Too late for that. Everyone around us heard her yelling.  _

“Please, just leave me alone.”  _ And please please please don’t let me start crying. _ He hates that that happens. And he can tell it’s coming. 

“Okay, fine. I know when I’m not wanted.” The girl turns away in a huff, and Mac sighs in relief. 

He jumps again when Bozer walks up beside him, followed by Leanna and Riley. Riley walks up to him, so she can talk without shouting. “Uh, Mac, do you have any great ideas for how we’re gonna get access to those computers? Because it looks like the only way anyone’s getting into those rooms is...um...hooking up.”  _ I was afraid of that. _

“There’s only one thing that’s going to hold these kids’ attention long enough for you to check the rooms,” Bozer says. “The only thing that earns respect from guys like this is a keg stand.” He points to the ramshackle ‘Wall of Fame’ near the door, with pictures of various college guys upended over a keg. 

“Bozer, you’re not gonna…”

“I’ll be fine.” Mac shakes his head. He knows Bozer hates to get drunk, ever since he watched what it did to his mom. And now he’s volunteering himself for it. To try and help them. 

“I don’t want to ask you to do something that you…”

“Mac. I can handle it.” There’s a sharpness in Bozer’s voice that stings. “We all have to face our demons for this job. And just because mine looks like a beer bottle and not…” He trails off. “I’m sorry. That was...that was cruel of me. To try and compare…”

“It hurt you. And...I don’t want to ask you to tear that hurt open again.”

“Mac, if we don’t find him, another bomb goes off. People die. You’re out here, and I know you hate this place right now, and you want to leave, but you’re staying and doing this job anyway because it’s important. If you don’t want me to ask you to stop, to protect yourself, then don’t ask me to. Okay?”

Mac nods.  _ I’m not the same person I was. And neither is Bozer. _ Boze is stronger than Mac gives him credit for too.  _ We all carry around a lot of pain, and none of us will let that stop us. _ “Go on.”

Bozer jumps up on a chair and grabs the mic from the D.J. 

“Okay, everybody, listen up!” The music stops. “My name is Bozer. And I was put on this planet for two reasons.

“Two reasons!” Riley shouts, she’s getting into the spirit. 

“To drink beer and kick ass.”

“Kick ass!” Leanna yells. 

“See, I don't care what that lame-ass wall of misfits say, I am the keg stand champ. You hear me, Alan Kam...Kam…” 

“Kaminsky,” Riley shouts.

“What she said. You're going down. Tonight we're crowning a new king! You can just call me...the Boozer!” With a yell, he jumps down from the chair, tears open his shirt, and rushes toward the beer keg.

It reminds Mac of some of the Friday nights at Weathers’s. Before Mama Bozer got so bad she couldn’t leave the house, before Bozer gave up drinking because he was afraid of using it to mask his pain too. 

He swallows hard and turns around. He can’t afford to get caught up in any memories. Bozer will only be able to do this so long, and they have a search to run.

The first room he checks comes up clean, and he moves on to the next one down the hall. He sees Riley’s hair and grey shirt disappearing into the one next door.  _ She doesn’t have anything either. _

The door to this room isn’t locked like the last one, so he tucks his paperclip back in his pocket. Mac pushes open the door, and turns away quickly at the sight inside.  _ Guess a few people decided to ditch the party early. _ Neither the frat guy or his female partner actually bother to look up.  _ Guess they’re too drunk or high to care about an audience.  _

“Sorry,” he mumbles, pulling the door closed.  _ Hopefully we find the email on another student’s computer.  _ He doesn’t want to go back in there anytime soon. He leans against the wall for a couple seconds, taking a few shaky breaths. The sounds and smells aren’t doing his already tangled brain any favors. 

He’s never understood why people find the idea of casually having sex so appealing, especially not now. He can’t imagine much worse than knowing someone who doesn’t care about you at all took something precious from you, just for the momentary pleasure of it.  _ Don’t go there, don’t get lost in your head. Just finish this.  _

He pushes open the next door, but he only just gets the flashdrive plugged into the computer before he has to reach for the trash can next to the desk. He’s retching uncontrollably, feeling as sick as if he’d had a dozen of those cups of beer he was offered. All he can think about is the way Murdoc sounded every time, the feel of his hands on Mac’s skin…

He has to get out of this now. He has to find a way to ground himself or he’s going to have a panic attack and someone is going to find him on the floor of this room, crying. He switches on his comms, to the channel that only goes to one person. 

“Jack…”

“Are you okay, kiddo?” Jack’s voice sounds like he’s on high alert. “Did they catch you? Are you safe?”

“I’m okay…” he glances down at the computer. “I’m just checking for the emails. But…” 

“But what?”

“It’s nothing. I handled it.” 

“Mac, if I need to come in there and start busting heads, so help me, I will.” Jack’s voice has taken on a menacing edge.

“I’ll tell you later, okay?” If he keeps talking Jack will get mad and come rushing in, and blow the whole op. He can’t let that happen, can’t be the reason they fail and another bomb goes off. “I’m all right.”

He can handle this. He has to.  _ Take a breath, get a grip, and do the job. _ And then the light on the flashdrive blinks green, and he pulls it out. “Jack, I got something. I have to go.”

* * *

Leanna’s just closing the door of the last room on her list when she hears Mac over the comms.“Matty, found our guy. Simon Jones.”

“Find him. Find him now,” Matty says, and Leanna hears her phone ping. She pulls it out of her pocket and glances at the picture on the screen. She hurries back into the main room. The chanting is still going on, and as she listens, she can’t believe they’re only just about to hit two minutes. Bozer is still upended over the keg, but just as the guy timing him calls two minutes, he drops down, a silly grin on his face.  _ Alcohol must hit him fast and hard. _ She’s never seen him drink, aside from that op in France where they took the enzyme to break down the alcohol before it could affect them. And based on what she knows about his mother, she knows the reason he avoids drinking. 

“Leanna, I'm not seeing Simon,” Riley says. “And I’m about to have to fend off a football player with more muscle than brains.” Leanna doesn’t envy him what will happen if he gets insistent. She watched Riley  _ destroy  _ gym training dummies for the three months it took them to find Mac. 

“I got him. He's headed for the door.” She puts her phone away and walks up to the clearly nervous guy. “Hey.” He turns toward her, and she grabs the pressure point in his shoulder. He doesn’t even have time to struggle before his eyes roll back and he drops like a stone. Riley rushes up just as Leanna’s legs start to buckle. For a skinny guy, he’s surprisingly heavy. 

“Vulcan nerve pinch. Nice,” Riley chuckles.

“Thanks. Help me get him upstairs.” 

Bozer joins them, stumbling up the steps. “Hey. Someone stole my shirt.”

Leanna shakes her head. “You tore it off. Now come on.” She’s already breathless from the effort of carrying Simon.

Mac is already waiting in the room when they arrive, with a handful of power cords he uses to help them secure Simon to a chair. Riley fills a cup from the bathroom sink while Leanna rummages through a drawer, pulls out a shirt at random, and tosses it to Bozer. 

He pulls it on, then stares at the front of it. “Huh. ‘Beer love I.’ Why is my shirt upside down?” Leanna barely avoids a giggle. Riley returns with the water, splashing it into Simon’s face, and he coughs, gasping and shaking his head. 

“What's going on? Who are you people?”

Riley shakes her head. “Simon, let us ask the questions here, all right? Trust me, you're gonna want to cooperate. We know you got an e-mail, who was it from?”

Mac leans down, looking the guy in the eyes. “Look, Simon, if you don't talk, you're gonna be charged with domestic terrorism and sent to federal prison. Guys like you don't do too well in there.”

Leanna cringes at the thought that Mac’s speaking from personal experience. She didn’t meet him until long after his prison stint, but seeing the trauma after his time with Murdoc has given her a sad awareness of what his life must have been like.  _ And this was just three months.  _ She knows Murdoc was using drugs and playing on Mac’s damaged brain as well, but still she’s sure it was all too similar to his past experience.  _ I don’t know how he’s suffered so much and is still willing to come back to this job. _

Simon’s eyes are wide. “I-I don't understand. How can I be charged with domestic terrorism? I-I've been working with the CIA.”

“I'm sorry, did this dude just say CIA?” Bozer slurs. 

“Yes. They recruited me.”  _ Oh no. _ Leanna’s heard of this kind of con before.  _ Damn it. _

“Okay, if that's the case, what's the name of the agent you've been working with?” She asks. 

“I-I was never given a name.”

“Okay, what does he look like?” Riley says. 

“I have no idea. I was supposed to meet him for the first time tonight. I was picking up a package.”

“He's talking about a bomb,” Mac whispers. “The recruiter's planning another attack.”

“Where was this meeting supposed to be taking place?” Leanna asks.

“Uh, I don't know. I don't know. Um...But my-my contact e-mailed me GPS coordinates. I'm supposed to be there in, like, twenty minutes.”

“I need your decryption code for that email, and I need it now,” Riley says.

“It’s Cerberus. My passcode is Cerberus.” Riley types it in, and the letters and numbers on the screen descramble, forming a legible set of coordinates.

“He's telling the truth.”

“Well, then, we need to get to this meeting now,” Mac says quietly. 

* * *

TEN MILES FROM THE MEETING SITE

THEY’RE LATE

Jack is currently trying to drive with Bozer standing up out the sunroof in the back. “I'm the king of the world!” He whoops, and Jack shakes his head.  _ Reminds me of the high school parties back home in Texas.  _ Except that more often, their idea of a good time after drinking was riding standing up in a saddle. Or sometimes in the back of a pickup truck. 

But it’s making it more than a little hard to put the pedal to the metal and get to that meeting location. He’s glad to see that Leanna and Riley, one on each side of Bozer, are trying to pull him back inside. 

“Bozer, get down,” Leanna scolds. Riley is less diplomatic. She smacks him in the back of the knee, and he buckles, falling back down into his seat. 

There’s a few seconds of silence, and then Bozer speaks up again. “You know what? Suddenly, I don't feel so great. Jack, can you maybe slow down?”

“Nope, sorry, man. We are ten minutes late already. Riley, any luck with the cameras in the area?”

“No. The only one is three miles away from these GPS coordinates. This location was chosen for a reason.”

Matty’s voice on the comms is clipped and angry. “The CIA just confirmed what we already suspected. There's no officially sanctioned Agency ops running out of Western Tech. This is a "false flag" operation.”

“So Simon's contact is pretending to be CIA to trick students into betraying the U. S.?” Bozer asks. “I saw this in a movie once. I wonder if he saw the same movie…” His voice trails off, slurring.  _ Damn it, man, don’t get sick in my car… _ Mac is the only one allowed to make a mess of Jack’s baby. 

“Okay, guys, satellite's up, but perimeter's empty. There's nobody there,” Riley says. “We missed the meeting.”

“When Simon didn't show, they must've assumed he'd been exposed,” Mac says. He hasn’t talked much since Jack picked them all up at the frat house, and he’s sure it has something to do with whatever the kid didn’t want to tell him about earlier. 

“So we just lost our best chance to catch this guy. Now what?” Leanna asks.

“I dunno about you guys, but I'm gonna try really hard to not puke,” Bozer says weakly. 

“Hey, here, if you’re gonna do it, do it in this.” Jack hears something plastic unfolding. “I keep a barf bag in the back of Jack’s seat at all times, just in case.”  _ Probably ever since I took her back to her house after she had to have an anesthetic to patch a wound up and was in no condition to drive.  _ She’d thrown up all over the back seat and the next day, when she found out what happened, insisted on helping clean it, even with the five-inch gash on her ribs still fresh. 

Mac turns toward the window, arms crossed protectively over his own stomach. “Mac?” Jack asks. “Kid, you look almost as sick as Bozer. How much did you have?”

“None,” Mac whispers. It almost sounds like a whimper. “I couldn’t start. I was scared.” 

_ Scared? Oh kiddo, oh hell no. _ “Scared of what, Mac?” 

“A couple of the girls...they wouldn’t leave me alone, they kept touching me.” He shudders. “They didn’t...But they were trying to get me drunk, I could tell. They wanted me to come with them and they were kind of upset I kept refusing.” Jack takes a deep breath, forcing himself not to punch the nearest solid object.  _ Damn it, I thought this op would be a gentle return to the field. Not just more trauma.  _ But he should have known better than to even entertain that thought. 

He shakes off the thought that no matter what, his poor kid could have been traumatized just like he is now.  _ Even if he went to college instead of prison, that’s no guarantee he would have been safe from unwanted attention.  _ It kills him to think that so many people see Mac as nothing more than something to be used, or a prize to be won.  _ Any way this played out, he could have been broken.  _

He glances over at the Mac beside him, hoping the sight of the living, breathing, present-day kid pushes out his mental images of a college age Mac crying in the corner of a dorm room.  _ He would have just been another statistic. Or not even that.  _ He’s pretty sure, knowing his kid, that Mac would be one of the all too many victims of a campus rape who would never even report it.  _ He didn't want us to find out about what happened to him, except that after Bishop he had no choice. We were right there for it. _ It sickens him that sweet, good kids like Mac can go the rest of their lives living with a horrible hidden trauma that eats away at them. 

“Pull over here,” Mac says suddenly, breaking Jack out of his train of thought. “I have an idea. See that?”

Jack looks up. Off to the right, hanging above a cornfield, there’s a white globe, gleaming in the moonlight. “Dude, are you planning to ask the aliens for help? They might be a little busy makin’ crop circles.”

“That’s a weather balloon, Jack.”

“He’s right,” Matty says. “This is where Western Tech's Meteorology Department conducts its weather experiments.”

“Hey. Look. An alien orb,” Bozer says, stumbling out of the car. “Beam me up, Scotty!” He promptly trips over something on the ground and falls face first. 

“Please tell me you were recording that,” Leanna says to Riley with a chuckle.

“She may not have been, but that balloon was,” Mac says.

“See, I’m telling you, the aliens are watching us!” Jack says. 

“ _ Not  _ aliens, Jack.” Mac shakes his head. “Don’t encourage Bozer. But that balloon should be able to tell us who was here earlier.” He climbs out and starts rummaging around in the car trunk, pulling out the jumper cables and attaching them to the car battery. “Jack, I'm gonna need you to start the car.”

Jack does, and Mac touches the end of one of the cables to the wire holding the balloon up. There’s a loud pop, fragments of balloon fly everywhere, and Mac runs out into the field toward where most of the debris fell. 

Bozer is back on his feet, vacantly staring at the sky where the balloon was. “Good job. I hate balloons, too. And clouds.”

Riley and Jack wade into the corn to help search, leaving Leanna with the increasingly disoriented Bozer. “Okay, Mac, I'll bite,” Jack chuckles, digging through corn leaves and kicking along the ground.  _ Just like hunting Johnny Wallis’s baseballs. _ “Other than pissing off a few meteorology nerds, what's popping that thing gonna do?” 

“Well, weather balloons can do a lot of things. Including, suspend a thermal camera high above a corn field to measure the heat impact on crop yields.” He holds up a small black box. “This camera, every ten seconds, was snapping a high, wide-angle thermal photo of the field, including the road that runs through it, to show the progression of sun damage on crops.”

“And since this is the only road out here, whoever was meeting Simon must've driven down it,” Riley says. 

“Exactly. There may be a photo on here that can help us ID our recruiter.” Riley takes the camera from Mac, pulls out the SD card, and plugs it into a port on her rig. She starts flicking backward through pictures, and Jack chuckles as he watches Bozer go from a body on the ground to upright.  _ It’s even funnier in reverse. _ But he stops laughing when he sees what comes before. 

“Guys, this car drove up right before Simon's meeting, parked for five minutes and then left. Gotta be his contact.” Riley turns her rig on the hood of the car so everyone can see. 

“Does everyone else see a red squiggly shape or is it just me?” Bozer asks woozily. 

“No, it's not just you, but we might be able to use that red squiggly shape to help us ID Simon's contact,” Mac says. 

“Yeah, look at the heat signature,” Riley says. 

“There's no engine. It's running off a battery,” Jack mutters.  _ Thought something looked weird about it. _

“It's an electric vehicle,” Leanna says. 

“Uh-huh.” Mac nods. “Matty, can, uh, you run the chassis shape and see if you can get a make and a model? If we do get a hit we can cross-reference it with staff and faculty vehicles.” Jack leans on his own car. It sounds like having something to do is taking Mac’s mind off the trauma for the moment, but he’s sure that when the op’s over Mac is going to crash and crash hard.  _ I’m really glad I live with him now. Practically have been anyway, for a while now.  _ But it’s nice to be able to be there permanently for his kid. 

“I can do that, but it might take some time,” Matty says. 

“Right now, it's our only option,” Riley says.

“All right. Stand by for a name.” Jack nods, then cringes when he hears Bozer actually start throwing up.  _ At least it wasn’t in my car.  _

* * *

JULIAN SLOANE’S HOUSE

HOPEFULLY THIS TIME THEY HAVE THE RIGHT GUY

OR THIS WILL BE REALLY EMBARRASSING. 

Riley would be concerned that this is the second time in twelve hours she’s tied a man to a chair, but this isn’t even close to Singapore. Or Kiev. She finishes securing the zipties (she grabbed some from Jack’s car), and then opens her rig in front of the man, while Mac pulls the duct tape off the guy’s mouth.  _ I don’t envy him this conversation. _

Matty’s voice is cold and angry. “Julian Sloane, I'm Matilda Webber, and I work for an agency you never heard of.”

“You have a lot of explaining to do, Ms.Webber,” Sloane snaps. “Your people just kidnapped me off the street.” Jack shrugs, shaking out his fist and rolling his wrist over. 

“Oh, you want to play private citizen? Fine. But you're not really a citizen of this country, are you,  _ Mischa Burov _ ? Born in Moscow, 1963. Joined the KGB in 1981.” Sloane...or Burov, growls. “In 1985, you were sent to the States to recruit spies. And in 1986, you applied to the Western Tech Admissions Department under the name Julian Sloane.”

“You were hired and since worked your way up to head of admissions,” Riley says. “Then, in '91, the USSR crumbled. So, what did you do? You turned your recruitment ring into a private moneymaking operation.” She feels like punching the guy in the face herself.  _ How dare he make these kids think they’re doing something good and noble, only to use them for such nefarious things? _ She wonders if the kids might be lucky they didn’t have to live with the fallout of what they were duped into doing.  _ They’d either walk around with that guilt on their conscience, all those lives, or they’d end up in prison for terrorism. _ And she knows all too well what that looks like. “Working in the admissions department gave you access to students' profiles and records, allowing you the opportunity to handpick who you wanted to admit and recruit.”

“A nice story. But it's just a story,” Burov snaps. 

Matty smiles coldly. “Except it isn't. I've got ten years of e-mails sent from your account to your student recruits ordering dozens of bombings.”

Riley nods. “Bombings that directly correlate to deposits made into your offshore bank account. Oh, yeah. We found that, too.”

Matty frowns. “Your last three deposits all came from the same place, which tells me that you were hired to set off three bombs. Two already detonated. So where's the third, Mischa?” 

Jack steps up. “We know you didn't make the handoff to Simon. And there's no bomb in your car, your office, or your home. Which means you planted it yourself.” He leans down, his voice menacing, eyes dark with anger. “And if you want to make this easy for yourself, I suggest you tell us where you put it.” His hand is resting on the handle of one of his serrated tac knives. “What was Simon's target?” 

Burov lifts his chin, tilting his head with a proud, scornful glare. “Turn on the news at 9:00. All your questions will be answered.” Jack gives Riley a small nod, and she turns to the others, motioning to them to leave. What happens now will not be pretty. 

Bozer and Leanna are already in the hall. Leanna is nursing a cup of coffee, Bozer a glass with something fizzy and orange. Probably Alka-Seltzer. 

“It's just after 8:00 a.m.,” Matty says. “Which gives us less than an hour before that third bomb goes off.”

“That's just not a lot of time,” Riley says, trying to ignore the choked screams from the room behind her. “GPS in Sloane's car has been turned off. There's no way to tell where he's been.”

Mac interrupts, looking vaguely sick himself.  _ He knows Jack is only doing this to save lives, but still, he doesn’t like to see that side of him. And probably even less so after Murdoc. “ _ The, uh, time stamp on the weather balloon photos, it said that Sloane drove away from the cornfield at 2:00 a. m., and we grabbed him at 7:00 a.m.”

“So he drove two and half hours max to the target and two and a half hours back,” Leanna says. 

“The list of potential targets is massive,” Riley says. She’s input the data into her computer, and even with the added timeframe she still has too many variables. “Okay, let's review what we already know. The students involved in these attacks used their employee access to sneak the bombs into the buildings.”

“What did Simon have access to?” Leanna asks. 

Matty answers. “Well, he's a Chinese and business double major. Did a semester abroad interning at the Shanghai National Bank.”

“Shanghai doesn't fit our timetable,” Leanna says. 

“No. But the Shanghai National Bank does have a corporate services branch located on the twentieth floor of a building half an hour from Western Tech.”

“Well, that's got to be the target,” Mac says. 

Riley nods. “Without Simon's access, Sloane couldn't have snuck his bomb into the bank. So where'd he hide it?” 

“Probably somewhere in the building he could easily access,” Mac says. “Like the lobby.”

“Go. Now.” Matty’s voice is stiff and urgent. A few seconds later, Jack walks out the doors, wiping bloodied hands on his pants. Riley looks away for a moment, then falls into step with him as they hurry out to the car.  _ Some days, no matter how long we’ve worked together, it’s more than a little disturbing to see the places he can go inside himself.  _

She doesn’t let herself wonder what he’ll do to Murdoc when they find him. She’s seen the mug shot taped inside his locker. And the dozens of tears and holes in it.  _ I don’t actually pity him, but I also don’t know if I want to be there to see it.  _ Because it will be violent and vicious and brutal, and no matter what the standing orders are, Riley doesn’t think Murdoc will be alive to see the inside of a jail cell at the end of it. 

* * *

Mac tries to ignore the chaos of horns honking and tires screeching, and the way he’s being flung around in the back of the car, and focus on building what he needs. He stole a few things from the fake admissions guy’s house before they left, at least he doesn’t have to ask for Jack’s phone. 

Riley’s combing security cameras while Jack drives like a madman. “Damn it. He walked in dressed as cleaning crew, I think. They were all over the lobby, I have no idea if any of the guys I can see on camera set the bomb. They all look the same from above, and there was one cleaning trash cans, one working on some tables and chairs, and I can’t see the bomb at all.” 

“Yeah, but it's not invisible,” Jack says. “Mac, you got some way to detect it, right?” 

“Yep.” Mac continues fiddling with his almost-completed gadget. “It's called an induced secondary emission generator.”

“Do all those big words mean "transparent bomb finder", by chance?” Jack asks. 

“Pretty much. When I pass this over the bomb, it will shoot ions at it, causing it to glow orange.”

Riley looks up from her computer. “The bomb squad is on its way, but their ETA is thirty minutes. Not enough time.”

“How far out are you guys?” Matty asks. 

“Nearly there,” Leanna says. Just then Jack squeals to a stop outside the building and they all jump out, forcing their way past a surge of people leaving. 

“Mac, you have fifteen minutes to find that bomb before it goes off,” Matty says.

“Yeah. So, no pressure. Thanks.” He takes a deep breath.  _ Don’t panic, don’t start shaking, just do the job.  _

He flinches at the sound of the fire alarms squealing inside the building. _ We called in that there was a bomb threat, so they’re evacuating.  _ And the alarm must have been the fastest way to get people out. Still, the shrill sound and glaring lights are making his already pounding headache worse. He hasn’t slept in over twenty-four hours, he’s dehydrated, and he’s stressed. And he has a bomb to find.

“Guys, even if they clear this building, the blast radius of the bombs in Morocco was massive,” Leanna says. “That bomb will take out the adjacent buildings as well. We'll never get everybody out in time.”

“Well, then I guess it comes down to Mac and his bomb detector,” Jack says. “How’s it going, kiddo?”

Mac’s passing the detector over anything he can think of. Plant pots, railings, tables, and coming up empty.  _ I can’t find it. And if I can’t find it, we’re all going to die, and so are hundreds of innocent people. I have to find it. I have to.  _

“We got 12 minutes, Mac,” Bozer says. 

“Not helping,” Mac whispers.  _ I know I have the lives of everyone around me in my hands. I don’t need to start freaking out.  _

“At least if we die, I'm spared a massive hangover,” Bozer groans. He must still be a little out of it from the alcohol. 

“Yeah, that's a bright side, I guess,” Leanna mumbles. 

Mac glances around the room again.  _ He came in as cleaning crew...what did Riley say? They were all over the lobby, wiping down furniture, changing the bags in the trash cans...The trash cans! _ He rushes over to them.  _ Perfect spot. Cover the exterior with the bomb sheeting, and then drop the trigger inside.  _ There’s an orange glow when he runs his device over the green can marked ‘recycling’. 

“I got it. It's right here.”

“Can you disarm it?” Riley asks. 

“Not in time. There's too many redundancies. If I try, I could set it off.”

“What about trying to contain the blast?” Jack asks.

“No. There's just too much explosive here.” Mac looks up at the wall, and then sees the seal on it, and the leaf image. “Wait, this is a green building.”

“Okay…” Riley says. 

“Means there are solar panels!” He jumps up, grabbing the bomb and pulling a bag out of one of the other cans. “Come on, we got to get to the roof. Now.”

He can hear the others following him up the stairs.

“Okay, you know I trust you, hoss,” Jack pants, “But what is this gonna accomplish other than me dying of a heart attack from all these stairs before the bomb has a chance to kill me? I’d almost rather just take the bomb and have it over in a flash, ya know?”

“Solar panels have hydrogen fuel cells. I'm gonna use 'em to get rid of the bomb.” Mac pushes open the roof door, runs across to the control bank for the panels, and starts grabbing wires to tie the loose plastic bag to the can. 

“Can you do it fast? We got about two minutes,” Riley says.

Mac nods, yanking the hydrogen tubing out and pumping the gas into the bag. Slowly, the can Mac watches it rise, then veer toward a neighboring building.  _ No, no, no. _ “Come on, get up there. Higher. Higher. Come on, come on. Higher.” He doesn’t realize how tightly he’s clenched his fists until he feels Jack’s hand slip into his. 

“You did everything you could, kiddo,” Jack says. “But come on, we gotta take cover.”

They barely make it behind a roof vent with Riley, Leanna, and Bozer, before there’s a loud explosion. Mac looks up, to see a fireball in the sky and a small shower of debris raining down. But no buildings are collapsing or on fire. 

Bozer giggles. “Fireworks!”  _ Guess he’s still more drunk than I thought. _

Riley shakes her head. “He’s right though. That would've looked so much prettier at night.”

* * *

MOTEL ROOM

THIS ISN’T THE FIRST AWKWARD CONVERSATION JACK’S HAD IN ONE

When Jack knocks on the door of room 16, Billy Colton pulls it open. He has a bag of frozen peas pressed to one eye, and there’s dried blood on his upper lip.

“What, your computer nerd skip turned out to be a weightlifter?” Jack asks. 

Billy sighs, shaking his head. “Very funny. But I know you didn’t swing by to ask about how my skip chase went. He’s in the bathroom by the way. Tied up in the shower.”

“Nice.” Jack nods. “But you’re right, I didn’t come here to talk about him. I came here to talk about someone else you’re chasin’.” He leans a little further through the door, shoving his boot in the crack. 

“Riley.” Billy undoes the latch chain and pulls the door open a little wider. “You wanna come in?” 

“Yeah.” Jack walks in, but he doesn’t sit down. Not for what he has to say.

“I guess you’re here to give me the dad speech,” Billy says. 

“Smart man. So then you also probably know what I’m gonna say, but I’m gonna say it anyway, because that way you’ve been fairly warned. Now listen to me. Riley is my little girl, and if you hurt her, I will personally hunt you down and tear you into little tiny pieces.”

“I’m not here to hurt her. She’s the one with commitment issues,” Billy says. “I know she’s been hurt, and that she’s scared to throw herself into anything. But I’m gonna be here waiting when and if she decides I’m the right man to trust.”

“Well, you better hope you are.” 

“Listen. Jack, I don’t want to imagine a future without Riley in it. And I’m gonna do whatever I have to to make that work. But I want her in this as much as me. I’m not gonna force her if I’m not the man for her.” He looks away from a moment. “I’ll wait for her; as far as I’m concerned we’re dating. I’m not gonna break her heart. That’s the last thing you need to worry about.”

“Good. Because I’d hate to have to explain to Mama what happened to her son and why.” Jack says.

“I know you just want the best for Riley. And so do I. I want her to be happy. And if she’s happy with me, then I’ll be the happiest man in the world.” Billy chuckles, then winces. “She’s the kind of girl that comes along once in a lifetime, and I don’t want to lose her.”

“You better believe that. And if she likes you, you’re a lucky guy,” Jack says, standing up. “Good talk, man.”

Billy opens the door for him, still holding the bag to his eye. “One more thing. Can we just...bury the whole Boba Fett thing?”

“Yeah, sure, Billy.” 

* * *

MAC’S HOUSE

“Oohh, nice shot, Sam,” Riley says as Cage’s ping-pong ball lands neatly in an almost full cup. Mac wonders who decided it was a good idea to let a trained former assassin in on this game. Sam is way too competitive. Jack, despite his natural knack for aim, is being silly, having more fun trying to bounce the ball off the most surfaces on the deck and still get it in a cup.  _ He still hasn’t beaten my ‘off the table, grill cover, trellis, wall, woodpile, into the cup’ shot. _ It’s really just simple physics...

“Drink up,” Riley says to Bozer with a chuckle. 

“All right.” He takes a small sip from the cup, then puts it back. “There. Okay? Everybody happy? All right.”

He tosses his own ball across the table, and it bounces so badly it lands on the floor. Mickey dashes after it, barking, and catches it in his mouth. Leanna groans. “Oh, nice. Dog saliva floats.”

“Whoa.” Riley shakes her head.

“What was that?” Mac asks. 

“My equilibrium's off.”

Jack sighs. “Dude, it's soda, not beer. You have no excuse.”

They all jump at the sound of Matty’s voice. “Really, guys? Whose idea was it to play beer pong with  _ soda _ ?”

“I've had enough beer for one lifetime.Thank you.” Bozer still looks a little...off. 

“You want to get in on this, boss lady?” Jack asks. 

“First things first.” Matty holds up her tablet. “We were able to connect the dots between the two attacks in Morocco and Shanghai National. Turns out the Moroccan government was doubling its efforts to fight terrorism and secured a loan at the Chinese bank to fund both a weapons development facility and a training center for their anti-terrorist troops.”

“Oh, so a local radical group was trying to hurt the government's efforts to stop terrorism,” Jack says. 

“Yeah. And they hired Sloane to maintain control over the region. But when they failed, they all went on the run. Which is good news for us and Morocco.”

Mac swallows hard, the repetition of ‘terrorism’ is starting to make him feel a little nervous and dizzy. He’s heard it too many times directed at him, and those memories are still a little jumbled, but all the more terrifying for it. “So what's gonna happen to the students that Sloane recruited?” He hopes they aren’t punished for acting in good faith. Even if they were a little naive. 

“Phoenix agents have already started to round them up. But they're victims in this, too, so they're all gonna need to be debriefed,” Matty says gently. 

Mac nods, then turns to where Riley and Jack are leaning on the wall, talking. 

“So...Billy said you gave him the shovel and shotgun talk.”  _ Yikes. I bet that was...interesting.  _ Jack’s been in overprotective dad mode since...well, since Mac came back, probably before that.  _ He’s just worried about someone else hurting his kids.  _

Jack nods. “I know you’re not ready to say what you two are, but…”

“I actually called him when we got back, that’s how I know what you did,” Riley says with a chuckle. “And I told him I’m officially ready to say we’re dating.”

“Wooo go Riley!” Bozer says, then groans. 

“Geez, Bozer, you still look like the south end of a northbound mule.”

“Thanks, Jack. The good news is I feel the south end of... whatever you said, too.”

Matty cuts in, tapping Mac’s arm gently to get his attention. 

“Hey, blondie, I've got something for you.” She holds out a small black bag. “It’s not actually from me, though. In light of everything you did for Western Tech, the administration wanted you to have this.” He reaches into the bag and pulls out a diploma folder, opening it up to see his name and the words ‘honorary degree’.

Mac knows he’s getting teary again, but he can’t bring himself to care.  _ After all this time, I don’t have to feel ashamed of never having managed to actually finish college. _ It’s one of the least of the things in his life he tries to hide, but the truth is, it stings. Every time someone sees him create something and asks where he went to college, what kind of degree he has, it hurts.  _ Everyone judges your worth now by your education. _ And now he can say he has a mechanical engineering degree from Western Tech. 

He turns around with a grin as music starts playing. Jack holds up his phone, which is now blaring ‘Pomp and Circumstance.” 

“Okay, hold it up, I need pictures.”

“Come on, Dad.” Mac chuckles. It sounds so right to say that. Even as he sees the whole circle around the fire go dead silent. Even as Jack drops his phone, almost into the flames, and Mickey snatches it up, the music now distorted by coming out of his mouth. 

“Oh, go get in the picture with him, Jack, I’ll use my phone,” Matty says, breaking the silence. Jack jumps up and throws his arm around Mac’s shoulder. 

“I’m so damn proud of you, son,” he says quietly, and Mac knows the smile on his face is probably going to be the biggest one this team will ever see.  _ It doesn’t matter what that creep in the Phoenix basement thinks of me. Because this family is proud of me and what I can do and how far I’ve come. _

Once Matty’s done taking pictures, including the obligatory silly faced one, Mac sits down beside Jack. 

“I think I’ll go see James tomorrow,” he says. 

“You sure you’re ready, kiddo?”

“Yeah.” He turns to look Jack in the eyes. “I need him to know he didn’t win. I need him to see that I survived.” 

Jack sighs. “You know, I went down to holding and told that bastard when Murdoc proved he had you. Wanted to see if I could wring some approximation of human sentiment out of him. You know what he did? Shook his head, like you’d failed to measure up in some way, and then turned his back on me. He’s not worth your time, Mac.”

“But I have to do this. For myself, Jack.” He looks up. “Like I had to call you Dad just now. I have to make some new memories to go in the spots that got erased.” Jack smiles a little. “And I want them to be of the right family in my life. But I also want to tell James that to his face.” 

“Okay, kiddo, that I can respect.” Jack nods. “Okay, guys, sappy time is over, and now it’s time to celebrate!” Riley, Leanna, and Cage cheer. Bozer groans. 

Matty picks up a ping-pong ball, hopefully not the one Mickey had a second ago, and bounces it off the table perfectly into a cup. 

“All righty, who's ready to take me on?” Jack chuckles and stands up. “Drink up, Dalton.”


	4. Guts+Fuel+Hope

###  304-Guts+Fuel+Hope

PHOENIX HOLDING CELLS

Mac swallows hard, staring at the heavy steel door in front of him. It doesn’t feel like all that long ago that the same kind of door slammed behind him, trapping him inside a living nightmare. Now, this one is opening up to let him in, to face a whole different nightmare. 

He takes a deep, shaky breath and steps through the door, handing his ID to the guard at the desk behind it. The man nods and tucks it into his pocket.  _ Safety measure. _ There are a lot of them. Mac can’t bring his knife in here, not even so much as one paperclip. And his shirt had to be a plain one with no buttons and no collar that could have tabs. He’s wearing a mock turtleneck, the long-sleeve tee he had on first showed the scars on his neck. He can’t wear a watch, or bring in his phone.  _ Nothing James could possibly use to escape.  _ But it still feels like Mac’s the one who’s being incarcerated. 

He winces when the heavy door slams closed.  _ I’m locked in, I can’t get out either. _ But he forces his breathing to slow down, feeling Jack’s solid presence beside him. Jack promised he’d just be here for emotional support, because Mac always feels calmer with him around. But Mac wants to talk to James by himself, without Jack jumping to his defense. He has something to prove. 

“Second cell on the right,” the guard says. “Keep six inches from the door at all times.” Mac nods. He walks up to the door, looking in through the mesh-reinforced bulletproof glass window. 

James is sitting on the edge of his cot. There’s a scruffy few days’ growth of beard on his face, and Mac can imagine that no one wants to give him a razor. He’s probably only allowed to shave under guard. 

He’s grateful that Phoenix’s detention uniforms are a dull beige and not the vivid orange that he’s learning incites panic attacks. He and Jack walked past a woman on the street wearing an orange sports team jersey crop top, and he could feel his throat closing up and his heart rate skyrocketing. Just hearing the door slam when he walked in sent shivers down his spine. 

Now that he’s here he’s not sure he’s up to facing this man. Sam says James is one of the hardest people to crack she’s ever seen. He’s cold and calculating, and she’s been trying to make headway on his information for months. He’s given up a few things, and apparently netted them a couple small fish in the criminal underworld, but he’s been shockingly uncooperative, for someone who’s going to spend the rest of his life in a tiny block cell. He can tell there’s something more there, something Sam won’t say, but he also knows he’ll never get it out of her if she doesn’t want him to know. 

James looks up from where he’s apparently studying the floor, when Mac taps a shoe against the cement. 

“Hello, son.” Mac forces himself not to cringe at the sound of that voice. 

“Don’t call me that. I’m not your son. You gave up that right years ago.” Mac snaps. 

“Deny it all you like, but you can’t deny blood, Angus. Everything you can do is because of me. You’re just like me, and you know it. You were born to be my protege.”

“Then why did you throw me away?”

“Because you were weak. Dependent on others to protect you. Dependent on me.”  _ You were my father, I was supposed to be  _ able _ to depend on you! _ “I needed you to learn how to survive on your own.”

“So abandoning me was some sick  _ training exercise?” _ Mac knows he’s all but screaming now, knows the anger is bubbling up the way it does now.  _ But it’s his fault I’m like this now. His fault that bomb went off, that I’m still living with the effects.  _ It’s James’s fault Mac was there in the first place. 

“You had to learn how to survive. Or the world will only eat you alive.” James snaps. “And clearly I was right about how prepared you were to survive it.” Mac cringes. “Maybe you’re right, maybe you are no son of mine. Not after what you’ve let people do to you.” Mac clenches a fist, and he hears Jack snarl wordlessly, but James’s voice drowns it out. “You’re still weak, Angus.”

_ “You can’t let them push you around like that. I’m not going to go to the principal and tell him my son is too weak to stand up to a couple schoolyard bullies. Find a way to make them leave you alone. This is just another lesson, Angus. How are you going to beat them?”  _

Mac swallows hard, forcing back tears.  _ Everything was another lesson. Everything was forcing me to fight for myself. _ The thought that James considers prison and Murdoc in the same category as lunch money thieves is sickening. 

“Mac, just let me punch him. You can get that door open, right?” Jack’s whisper is low and furious. “Matty’ll be pissed but I don’t care.” 

Mac shakes his head and turns back to the door. “You left me alone to teach me a lesson?” He asks again. “You know what it taught me? It taught me how to find the people I  _ could _ rely on. It taught me how to find my family.”

“You really think they’re family? When they only sent you down here so they can have what they want?” James’s laugh is sick. “They’re selling you out and you’re too blind to see it.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Mac forgets the order to stay away from the door until he feels Jack’s hand on his shoulder.

“Oh, they didn’t tell you did they? I made a deal. For every time they let me see you, they get one name and location. One terrorist, murderer, weapons dealer. And I suppose it was too good a deal to pass up.”

“You’re wrong.” Mac snarls. “I’m the one who asked to come down here. You’re not as important as you think you are to them. They don’t care if you sit and rot down here for the rest of your life and tell them nothing. But I came. So I could tell you to your face that you’re not my father. And that he is.” He turns to Jack. “And now I have. So let’s go.”

“Tell them I’ll honor my end of the deal,” James calls after them as they walk away. 

Jack shakes his head, once the doors to the cell block have closed behind them. “He’s one sick bastard, Mac. And I’ve seen a lot of ‘em.” He takes a deep breath. “How the hell does a good kid like you end up collecting the worst set o’ archenemies the world’s ever seen?”

“Archenemies is a little strong, Jack.” Mac chuckles. With the familiar weight of his knife in his pocket and a paperclip in his fingers, and that cold cell block left behind him, he’s feeling a lot better. 

“What? I thought it sounded cool.” Jack grins. “But for real, honestly, I think it’s a good thing that man ran out on you when he did. And I know that sounds harsh, but…”

“But if he stayed I could have ended up becoming just as much a monster.” The thought that that brutality, cruelty, and heartlessness is anywhere in his blood at all makes Mac sick.

“NO.” Jack turns him around to face him. “No, Mac, I don’t think there’s a single chance he could have twisted you that badly. You told me yourself, you didn’t even want to kill anyone when you could barely remember who you were.” His hands are warm on Mac’s shoulders. “Look at me, Mac.” Mac does, slowly. Jack’s brown eyes are burning with intensity. “Mac, I’m glad he left when he did because I think he would have kept trying to make you into another him, and I think at some point, when you proved you couldn’t be made into a monster like that, he would have...he would have snapped and killed you.” 

Mac wants to say that’s a big assumption, but the way James said “maybe you are no son of mine” is still ringing in his head.

He just nods and lets Jack fall into step with him, one arm still around Mac’s shoulders.  _ I always thought James left because I wasn’t good enough for him. But the truth is, Jack’s right. James left because I was too good for him. And that’s nothing to be ashamed of. _

* * *

MAC AND JACK’S HOUSE

IT FEELS RIGHT TO SAY THAT

“I’m telling you, it’s a gift.” Jack says, scooping the pile of cards into his hand. “I was born to play War.” He grins and ruffles the edges of his pile.  _ I’ve been waiting to do this. _ He’s played War with Riley plenty on long stakeouts, but with Mac, this is a first. 

“Jack, it’s a game of chance. There is literally no skill or strategy involved.” Mac shakes his head. But he can’t deny that Jack is holding most of the deck. He’s down to his last fifteen cards. Well, actually twelve now that he lost that war. 

“Oh really? Says the man who just lost his last Ace?” Jack grins, then tosses a piece of popcorn into the air for Mickey.

“Don’t feed him at the table, he’ll start begging,” Mac scolds. But Jack’s already seen the kid sliding some of his own snack under the table in his hand. 

“Mac, you know I can’t resist puppy eyes.”

“How bout if I use them to ask you to let me win?”

“That is an unfair use of the puppy eyes and you know it.” Jack grins, holding up his large stack of cards. “Now, back to family game night?” Mac nods. 

He’s just about to lay down another card when there’s a knock at the door. “I’ll get it,” Jack says. He knows it’s silly, to be so jumpy, but he can’t help imagining Murdoc standing there with his evil hungry smile.  _ He let Mac go. I don’t want to believe it, but I know he did. It’s like the Millenium Falcon in  _ New Hope _ . It was too easy. _

He wants to believe Murdoc is either dead or content to go on the run with his son, but there’s a deep twisting fear in his gut that won’t let him.  _ He wouldn’t give up like that. He practically branded Mac, he’s not done yet. _ And it’s terrifying that they have no idea where that monster is.

Fortunately, it’s not Murdoc. It’s just Riley. 

“Hey, Riley, you wanna come in and get your butt kicked in War?”

She laughs. “Guys, I’d love to, but Matty wants to see us.”

“Tell her it’s game night. The phones are off and in the cereal cupboard,” Jack says. 

Riley shakes her head. “She says there’s an overseas op with our names written all over it. She wants to put Mac in. Get him back on the horse, so to speak.” 

Mac jumps up from the table. “Really?”

Jack shakes his head. They’ve run two more small surveillance ops stateside; for not being cleared to work on US soil Phoenix does a lot of things there. But he didn’t imagine they’d get tapped for leaving the country so soon. “Are you sure?”

“She and Oversight are both saying Mac might as well be back in the rotation. He’s been cleared by medical and psych, just like any other agent.” Jack nods.  _ I know Mac’s been aching to get back to normal. _ And his tremors have gotten even better over the past week, now it’s only evident once in a while.  _ He’s healing incredibly well, and he knows it. _ There’s still the issues of the mood swings and headaches, but Dr. Grey finally found a medication Mac can take that won’t give him crazy side effects like most drugs do to him. And so far, it’s been working pretty well. Mac got tearful in the kitchen once this morning, but it only lasted a few minutes, and it wasn’t the violent sobbing attacks that they’ve dealt with before. Jack’s not sure how much of that is actual physical damage to the kid’s brain, and how much is just him trying to process ungodly amounts of psychological trauma. Mac snapped at him a lot when they first got him out of prison, too. But whatever the case, it’s improving.

Still, the thought of taking Mac back into the field isn’t a comfortable one. Jack would like to keep the kid sequestered in a bubble for the rest of his life. But that isn’t what Mac wants. And he knows it. 

“Okay, kid, you heard her. Let’s go save the world again.” 

* * *

WAR ROOM

IT FEELS GOOD TO HAVE THE TEAM IN HERE AGAIN

Matty looks around the room at her team. Aside from Cage, who’s in another round of interrogation with James (he says that since they gave him what he asked for, they’ll get one name, and she’s furious that he’s treating Mac like a bargaining chip), and Leanna, who’s making a report to CIA headquarters in Langley, everyone is back together. Seeing Mac in here is an overwhelming relief. 

“Okay, what’s important enough that you had to break up family game night, Matty?” Jack asks. She forces herself not to smile.  _ Jack moving in was probably the best thing that could have happened to Mac.  _ Mac has always reminded her of a teenager, and she’s glad he’s getting the chance to in some way experience what he missed out on when he actually was. 

She turns back to the screen behind her, pulling up images of a conflict zone. “Rebels are taking over the city of Tago in Georgia. They're blocking supplies and humanitarian aid from reaching innocent civilians.” 

Riley nods to the screen. “This was posted on the Web an hour ago.” She begins playing the video she stumbled across on one of her search crawls.  _ When she brought it to me, I knew we couldn’t walk away.  _

The camera picture is shaky, a blond woman in a white lab coat who appears to be filming while she walks. “My name is Dr. Lena Nakani. I am chief medical officer at Georgian Children's Hospital. Two days ago, rebels entered Tago, forcing many to flee the city. Supplies stopped showing up, including our weekly shipment of liquid oxygen.” She turns the camera away from herself and onto a row of beds, each occupied with a child on a ventilator. “Currently, we have twelve patients who require ventilator assistance to breathe. Which means, if a tanker of oxygen doesn't arrive here in twenty hours, these children will die. I am reaching out to the international community for help. If anyone sees this, please, they need you.” Matty hears a choked sound from one of the team. Possibly Mac. He’s more emotional now, or at least he doesn’t compartmentalize as much. It’s strange to see her usually reserved agent like that, but they’re all getting used to it. 

“Okay, we're in,” Jack says. “Do we have any idea where this tanker is?”

“That's the million-dollar question,” Riley replies. “Our intel suggests that the driver fled the violence and abandoned it.”

Matty nods. “The hospital can't get a replacement because the only oxygen plant in the area shut down after its employees stopped showing up to work.”

“So they couldn't find another driver?” Bozer asks. 

“They tried. No one wants the job now that rebels have taken over,” Matty says.  _ I can’t blame them. But that’s twelve lives on the line.  _

“And-and what about airlifting the oxygen to the hospital?” Mac asks hesitantly.

Riley shakes her head. “That would work if the rebels hadn't seized Georgia's anti-aircraft guns. They're shooting down everything flying into the region. Delivery by land is the only option.”

“Which is where we come in,” Jack says. 

“Correct. Jack, Mac, Riley, you three need to find that missing tanker and get it to that hospital, before it's too late. Bozer, you’ll be running point with me from here.” 

Riley looks up from her rig. “The tanker itself is old. It has no GPS locator. So our best guess is that it was abandoned somewhere on the main road between the oxygen plant and the hospital. I’ve begun a satellite search for the tanker’s visual signature, based on the image the hospital provided of it, but if it was abandoned under any kind of cover, we won’t be able to see it.” 

Matty closes the briefing screen. “Your flight leaves in ten minutes. That leaves you six hours to find a needle in a haystack and drive it past an army of violent rebels in time to save twelve innocent children.”

“No pressure or anything,” Jack says. 

Mac shakes his head. “Nope. None at all.”

“Alright then. Let’s do this. Been dying to do something like this since I saw  _ Convoy _ ,” Jack says with a grin. “Pull over, Chuck Norris, we’re about to do something way cooler.” 

Matty pulls Mac aside as the team starts to walk out. “Mac, I tapped you for this because of the amount of improvising it might require. But if you don’t feel up to the mission yet…”

“I want this. Matty, I want this really bad.” He looks her in the eyes, and she sees a spark of the old Mac there, the determination and courage. Except that now, it burns even brighter.  _ Murdoc thought he broke Mac. But he only set the Phoenix free. _ Mac got the chance to prove to himself that he could face and defeat his own worst demons. And now, Matty can see, nothing is going to stop him.

“Good. Because we need you. And so do those children.”

“I won’t let them down.” And for once, it doesn’t sound guilt ridden, or fearful, as if he’s afraid of punishment if he doesn’t succeed. It sounds...fierce. And Matty thinks, not for the first time, that she likes what Mac has become. Free of his father’s influence at last, healing from the paralyzing pain in his past, she can finally see the fire that’s come from the ashes.  _ He chose that vigilante name with far more meaning than he could ever have imagined. _ She smiles. 

“I know you won’t. Now, you’ve got a plane to catch.” 

* * *

SOMEWHERE IN GEORGIA

THE COUNTRY, NOT THE STATE

FOUR HOURS AND TWENTY-SEVEN MINUTES ON THE CLOCK

Jack winces at the sight of burnt-out cars and houses, some still smoldering.  _ Damn, last thing I need is to be the one who has a flashback or a panic attack or something.  _ The smell of scorched metal and cloth, and burned gasoline, is heavy in the air. He switches on the SUV’s internal AC circulation. He doesn’t need to breathe in all those memories. 

“Hey, guys, just a heads-up. You should be entering rebel territory right about now.” Bozer is always...interesting to have back home in the War Room. He tends to either narrate every detail like he’s making a nature documentary, or state the obvious like they’re right there next to him with no way to see what’s happening. But Jack doesn’t really blame him. Working ops from the other end of comms is always hard. It’s why he’s never left the field.  _ Couldn’t do it. Couldn’t watch my team out there and not be with ‘em. _

“You don't say,” Riley says sarcastically.

Matty cuts in. “We have one piece of good news, guys. There’s a hospital across the border in Turkey that’s agreed to accept all twelve children. They’re standing by for a medevac transport, but they say they can’t justify sending their people into an active war zone. You’ll have to get the kids to them.”

“Do we have the ability to?” Riley asks. “Because this car isn’t exactly an approved medical transport, unless Mac can somehow work his magic.” 

“I’ve contacted the hospital. They do not have the equipment to transport the children safely, but there  _ is _ a UN peacekeeper force on its way to the city. Unfortunately their ETA is at least ten hours, and that’s not factoring in rebel assaults.” 

“Not soon enough for the kids.” Jack says. “We’ll keep them breathing till help shows up. I promise.” 

Riley parks at an intersection for a moment. “I’m going to see where we’re at on sat search.” Jack nods. He’s letting her drive for the moment so he’s totally free in case something unforeseen happens with Mac. The kid took his meds already, he should be fine, but it’s  _ Mac. _ And sometimes Jack thinks ‘fine’ is not in his kid’s vocabulary, except as a word to use in a lie. 

Suddenly, there’s a screech of tires, and something blows past them on the cross street. Jack stares. Mac starts talking, but into his comms, not to them.

“Bozer, didn't you say that tanker truck was silver and blue?”

“Yeah. Why?”

Riley answers for him. “I think we just found it.” She pulls out onto the road behind it with a screech of tires. “Who steals a tanker of liquid oxygen?”

“Pull up next to the cab, and let's find out,” Jack says, unholstering his gun and checking the mag. 

Riley guns the engine, and their SUV slides up next to the massive cabover semi. Up close, Jack can see the age of the truck. It’s worn out and rusty and scraped. And its driver matches the truck, a man with scruffy grey hair, a worry-lined face, and a tattered grey coat. 

Jack leans out the window and shouts. “Pull over. Pull over!” The man looks down at him, and then the truck speeds up, swaying dangerously on the road. 

“Okay, yelling at him didn't work,” Riley says sarcastically. “So how do we make him stop this truck?” 

“I could shoot out a tire,” Jack offers. 

“That would be the exact opposite of helpful,” Mac says. “We need the truck in good condition. We also can’t afford to have bullets flying and sparking, not with that oxygen in there.” 

“Yeah I know, I was just saying. I could.” Jack doesn’t like any other options. 

“I’m going to stop it, without wrecking it,” Mac says.

“Pretty sure that's Mac code for ‘I'm about to do something really dangerous’.” Jack says. “And it’s gonna be something I don’t like.”  _ Come on, Mac, we didn’t save you from Murdoc just so you can kill yourself trying to be a hero on your first overseas mission afterward.  _

“Yeah, pretty much…” Mac shrugs.

“Damn it, kiddo. Tell me what it is and I’ll do it.”

“Which of us worked on vehicles for a living for years?” Mac asks. “I know exactly what to do. Just let me do it.” 

“Don’t die. Okay? Just don’t die,” Jack says, shaking his head. 

Mac nods. “Riley, get as close to the cab as you can, and don't swerve.

“Okay.”

Jack watches nervously while Mac hauls himself out his window and onto the top of the SUV.  _ I don’t like this. I really don’t like this.  _ “Don't swerve,” he mumbles. “Don't swerve. Don't swerve.”

“I got that the first time, Jack,” Riley says. And then truck veers toward them and Riley instinctively pulls to the side to avoid a collision. Jack hears a skitter and thud from the roof of the SUV. 

“I said, ‘Don't swerve!’” Mac shouts breathlessly into comms, and Jack breathes a tiny sigh of relief that the kid’s still alive up there. 

“Sorry Mac,” Riley says. “But you better hurry, I think the driver’s onto us.” The truck is swerving all over the road now, clearly trying to block their vehicle from coming up alongside it. 

“Mac, this is crazy. Just get back in here and let me do it,” Jack says, leaning toward his own window to climb out. 

“Too late!” Mac shouts, and as the truck swerves again he flings himself onto it, between the cab and trailer. Jack stifles a cry of panic as the kid stumbles, then clutches at the hoses running between the cab and trailer to steady himself. If he falls...Jack can’t think about that. He has enough nightmares already of the kid being hit by a car and left to die by the side of the road like a stray dog. He’s had them ever since the first time Murdoc took the kid. 

Mac grapples with the hoses again, and Jack’s afraid he’s losing his balance for good, but no, he’s just pulling something loose. Jack hears a horrible screech as part of the trailer brake system locks up. The truck sways violently, there’s a smell of scorched metal, and the truck veers uncontrollably, swinging toward the SUV. Riley turns the wheel sharply, avoiding a collision with the truck, but at the speed they’re going their vehicle crashes through the guardrail and goes nose-down into a ditch, the front end crumpling. Jack leaps out, and so does Riley, as smoke begins to billow from under the hood. Jack races back onto the road, terrified of seeing Mac lying in the road. He’s not, Jack can faintly see his navy shirt against the pale blue of the still-swaying truck, and then the whole rig moves over to the side of the road, slowing to a stop.

“Damn it, the SUV’s totaled,” Jack says. He runs toward the stopped truck, watching its door open and the driver leap out. Mac jumps down from the back, and the man rushes toward him, something long in his hand. It looks like a tire iron. Mac dodges a blow from it, but he’s caught off guard when the driver rushes him, pinning him against the side of the cab. 

Mac’s still too skinny, and the driver is surprisingly strong for his age. Jack watches the kid get flung up against the side of the truck, the tire iron pressed across his throat. He’s scrabbling to get away, but there’s raw panic in his eyes and Jack knows the kid isn’t going to be able to fight properly, not when he looks this scared. 

He pulls his gun and trains it on the driver. “Drop it! Drop it.” The man does, stepping back. Mac leans over gratefully, panting for breath, and Jack watches Riley run up and catch him before he falls forward, wrapping an arm around his shoulders. 

“Thank you,” Mac pants out, glancing at Jack. 

“You lay a hand on my kid again, and you’ll lose it,” Jack snaps. Calling Mac his son is second nature now. “Now, what were you doing stealing this truck? 

“I'm not stealing it,” the man insists.

“Then what would you call what you were doing?” Riley asks. 

“I'm delivering. Lives depending on this oxygen.”

“Where were you taking it, then?” Jack asks, still not willing to lower his gun. 

“To its original destination: the children's hospital.” The man must notice the skeptical looks he’s getting from everyone in the group. “Yes, it's true. My son is, uh, is-is patient. He..look, he-” The man reaches for his pocket. Jack cocks his gun, training it on him. 

“Whoa, whoa, whoa.”

The man raises his hands, pulling out a smartphone. “No. It's-it's okay. It's photo. My Vano, my son. Before he was hospitalized.” He opens the screen and Jack sees that the background is a young boy with a wide smile and shaggy black hair. His heart twists. It reminds him a little too much of his own current phone wallpaper, the picture of Mac smiling and holding up his diploma. 

“When my wife and I learned that the shipment wasn't coming, I decided to…” 

“Track the truck down and deliver it yourself?” Riley asks. 

“Yes.”

“Well, aren't you worried about the rebels? They're killing everyone on sight.” Jack asks. 

“I'm only worried for my son and the children in the hospital.”

“Look, sir-” Riley says. 

“No, my name is Vasil,” the man says quickly. 

Jack nods. “Vasil. I'm Jack Dalton, this is MacGyver, and this is Riley Davis. We were sent by a government organization to deliver this truck to the hospital.”

“It's true?” Vasil asks. 

“Yeah,” Mac says, nodding. “We want the same thing you do, to save those children.” He’s not panting anymore, and he’s standing up straighter, but Jack hates the rust-stained reddish bruise line he can see across his kid’s throat. 

Vasil twists his hands together and holds them up as if in prayer. “This is the best news I've heard in days. Please, please, can I come with you? I-I can help you.”

“Uh, no, I don't think that's a good idea, Vasil,” Jack says. “This could get dangerous.”

“I have not seen my son in a week. I want to see my son.” 

Jack crumbles.  _ How desperate was I to get to Mac when he was missing? What would I have done to see him again? Or really, what wouldn’t I have done? _

“Okay, fine. Let's go save your son.” 

“Thank you! Thank you. Thank you.” 

Jack slides his gun back into its holster and grips the man’s hand.

* * *

Mac jumps at the sound of an explosion somewhere in the distance. He’s still on edge from being attacked by the truck driver...Vasil...a few minutes ago. He knows the man meant well, was trying to protect the oxygen shipment from people who could have been thieves, but it was still absolutely terrifying.

“What was that? Matty? Bozer? You guys hear that?” Jack asks. 

“Heard and saw, Jack.” Bozer’s voice sounds weary and worried. “It's the rebels. They're blowing up all the roads leading into the city.”

Mac sighs. “Which is a huge problem, because we only have four hours until the oxygen in the hospital runs out.”

Matty’s voice comes in, as strained as Bozer’s. “Mac, we checked every road into the city and confirmed the rebels have blocked or destroyed them all.”

“All right, so if the roads are out, how are we gonna get this oxygen to the kids, Mac?” Riley asks. 

Mac looks up, seeing the hills of Mission City instead of the mountains of Georgia. “We'll make our own road. See the clear-cut sections on the sides of the mountains there? That means there’s got to be logging trails that are used to transport the timber down to the main roads. We'll cut through those mountains, following the logging tracks, and we'll find a paved road on the other side of the rebels' perimeter.”

Vasil shakes his head, his face tight with worry. “I'm sorry, Mr. MacGyver, but that is just not possible. I know this area very well. It's very rough. This vehicle will never make it.”

“You're right, we won't make it in this vehicle. We'll have to give it an upgrade.” Mac grins. It’s been a while since he watched anyone turn a normal vehicle into an off-road truck, but he remembers the basic principles. Add shock absorption, reinforce the undercarriage, and cover any exposed lines and driveshafts to keep brush and debris from getting in or slicing something vital. “Guys, start stripping those cars for anything usable. See if you can find any working batteries, I need to make an arc welder.”

“What is this upgrade?” Vasil asks.

“Oh, this is gonna be fun,” Riley says, chuckling. “Mac loves playing with cars. And trucks.”

There are plenty of ruined cars along the road in walking distance, and Mac explains what he needs, helping Jack and Vasil and Riley tear apart the burnt out wrecks. 

Jack walks up while Mac is pulling the shocks out of one of the cars. “Mac, are you sure this is gonna be okay?” He asks quietly. 

“I know how trucks work, Weathers fixed a lot of ‘em. And you remember, I grew up in a town that was famous for dirt track and off road races.” He really needs to go see Val in person again. He’s called her a couple times, but it’s not the same. 

“That is not what I meant, kiddo.” Jack sighs, leaning down. “I am asking if you are going to pull any more insane, dumb, heroic stunts on us out there.”

“Only if I have to.” Mac smiles at him. “Come on, old man, help me carry this over there.”

“I’m surprised you didn’t tell me not to strain my back,” Jack chuckles, lifting two of the heavy springs. Mac grins. This teasing is a far cry from the snide comments he remembers at the start of their friendship. Now, ‘old man’ is a term of endearment. As is ‘Carl’s Jr.’.  _ If only we’d known back then what was going to happen... _

He’s busily at work under the truck when he sees worn leather shoes come up and then stop. Vasil leans down, glancing at where Mac’s finishing welding a plate of metal to cover some of the exposed lines under the body of the truck. 

“I wish Vano was here to see this now. He would say, "You are awesome." Vano loves trucks,” Vasil says wistfully. 

“So did I when I was his age. Actually, I still do. You know what? What do you say, when we get to the hospital, we ask the doctors if they'll him see the truck?” Mac smiles. 

“Oh, he would love that. He, uh, has been in the hospital for so long.” Vasil says. 

“Not to pry, but what's wrong with your son?” Jack asks. 

“Ah, his lungs are not fully developed.” Mac recognizes the sound of a parent in pain. He heard it in Mama Bozer’s voice a lifetime ago, when she got the call about Jerry.

“Oh.” There’s a world of pain in Jack’s voice too. 

“Doctors don't know why.”

“I can't imagine it's been easy for him,” Riley says quietly. Mac startles. He didn’t even hear her come up.

“No, no, it's been very difficult. But luckily, there are still heroes in the world.” He smiles at the three of them. 

“Aw, no. You're the hero, Vasil. You tried to drive this tanker through rebel-occupied territory by yourself,” Riley says. 

“I just did what any father would do for his son.” Mac sees Jack nod, and he swallows back tears of his own.  _ Some of us are lucky to be born with good fathers. Some of us are lucky enough to be able to find them along the way. _

Mac stands up, wiping his filthy hands on his equally grease and grime stained pants. “Okay, good to go.”

Matty’s voice crackles over comms. “Okay, if the truck is ready, you need to get moving. Guys, you've got some time to make up, so you better go fast.”

* * *

THREE HOURS AND TWELVE MINUTES ON THE CLOCK

“Hey, guys?” Bozer asks. 

“This is the Rubber Duck, go ahead, Double-O Boze,” Jack says. 

“Guys, what part of "You've got some time to make up" wasn't clear?” Bozer asks. 

Mac answers first. He’s leaning against the passenger window, watching the road flash by, while Riley drives and Jack sits in the back with Vasil. “We know, Boze, but if we drive any faster, then this tanker could start leaking, which is a problem because my build wasn't perfect. There's lots of metal parts in contact with other metal parts, so if we do start to leak, any spark could ignite the liquid oxygen inside and…”

Riley and Jack, in perfect synchronization, make a “k-bshhhh” sound. Vasil’s eyes go wide. 

“On second thought, slow works,” Bozer says hurriedly. 

“Yeah, that’s a ten-four, Bozer.”

“Dalton, if you insist on using that ridiculous CB radio slang, I’m going to cut your comms,” Matty says. 

“Ten-four...I mean, understood, Boss Lady.” 

Jack listens to Mac tap his fingers against the window glass and the handle of the door, and glances at the pile of paperclips on the grimy center console, mixed in with old candy wrappers, spent matches (someone smoked in here, he can smell it, and why an oxygen tanker driver would do that he has no idea, but hey, people are weird), and other general debris. It looks like Mac’s run out of his normal distractions.

“Hey kiddo, you finish all those paperclips you had?” Jack asks.

Mac nods mutely. Jack reaches into his pocket and fishes out a least a dozen more. “Hey, try to make these last, okay?” The irony of how he sounds like his mom giving him hard candies on family road trips is not lost on him. 

Mac takes the handful of paperclips with a small smile. 

“You have a very intelligent son, Jack Dalton,” Vasil says. “I cannot believe he fix truck so well.”

“Yeah, he’s a good kid.” Jack’s quickly come to the realization that he told Vasil to take his hands off his kid, and also that he only introduced Mac by his last name, which could have been misinterpreted as his  _ first _ name.  _ He genuinely thinks that’s my son. _ The thought sends a warm feeling through Jack’s heart. 

Matty’s voice slices right through that warmth. “Okay, I ran the numbers. At your current pace, you could still make it in time to save those kids, but you're cutting it close.”

“Yeah, how close?” Riley asks. 

“Let's just avoid any more delays. And guys, the rebels cut communication lines when they blew up the roads. I’ve lost all contact with the hospital.”

“Understood, Matty.”  _ Last they heard we were gonna make it in time. We can’t let them down.  _

He leans back against the back of the cab.  _ Worst part of this is the endless driving. _ There’s nothing but the hum of the tires on the road. Maybe he should catch some sleep while he can...

Jack hears a faint beeping through the comms.  _ Oh, that never means anything good. _ Sure enough, the next second, he hears Bozer’s worried voice. “Heads up. We got an unidentified vehicle moving towards you.”

“Most civilians have already fled the area, so unless you guys ordered Domino's, that's probably rebel patrol,” Matty says. “Jack, I trust you weren’t getting takeout.” 

“No,ma’am.”

“Have they spotted us yet?” Mac asks. 

“I don't think so. The terrain seems to have kept you hidden, but if you stay on that current heading, you're gonna run right into them.”

“Guys, there's a large cluster of trees northeast of your position, and a small trail leading behind them,” Bozer says. “You can make it, but you have to hurry. This time for real.”

“Roger that. Rubber Duck is about to put the hammer down.”

“Dalton…” Matty’s aggrieved tone is actually kind of amusing. 

Riley pushes down the gas pedal, and the truck lumbers up a few notches on the speedometer. 

“Those trees right there,” Mac says, pointing. Jack can see them, and the brown dirt track that leads behind them. 

“That’s not a trail, that’s a dry creek bed,” Jack says, noting where the dirt and stone disappears into a small culvert running beneath the road. “That’s gonna be a risk.”

“It’s more of a risk to stay on the road,” Riley says. “If the rebels catch us, they’ll shoot us and take the truck.” Jack nods. 

“Just try to keep the tires on the grass,” he says. Dried up creek beds are notorious for collapsing unexpectedly under any weight. Jack stuck the farm truck in one once on the way to take salt licks to the back pasture, and he watched a filly snap her foreleg falling in one when it gave out under her hooves. Cattle used to get stuck too, sometimes so badly they needed to be roped and pulled out. And none of those were as heavy as this semi. 

Riley pulls the truck over and parks it, shutting it off. Jack holds his breath as a small pickup rumbles by on the road. The vehicle stops, then backs up slightly.  _ That’s it. We’re toast. They heard us, or saw us, or something. _ Jack glances at the gun in his hand. He’s got a full mag, might be enough to buy them some time. If these guys come up to the truck, maybe he can take them out and buy their little convoy a little more time. 

It seems like forever before he hears the pickup pull away. Bozer’s voice comes in shaky over comms. “Okay. You're clear.”

There’s a collective sigh of relief inside the cab. Jack leans back, shaking his head.  _ That was close. Way too close. _

“My heart is racing,” Vasil whispers. 

“Yeah, mine, too,” Riley whispers back.

“Time to get moving,” Matty says. “You've got kids to save.” 

Riley nods, and turns over the engine. The truck roars to life and starts forward, then jerks to a halt. Riley frowns, pressing the gas pedal a little harder. Then she shifts into reverse. The truck moves just a little backward, then stops again. Jack can hear the scritch of tires spinning against gravel, and he sees Mac lean out the window, then hold up his hand for Riley to stop. She does. 

“That didn't sound good,” Bozer says. 

“Yeah, we're stuck,” Mac whispers nervously. He opens the door and jumps out, and Jack follows him. Sure enough, the tire on the front right side is sunk several inches into soft ground. 

“Damn it, a tire went down in the creek bed.” Jack sighs. He was afraid of this. “We hung the truck.”

“We-we don't have time for this,” Vasil whispers as he and Riley walk up.

“I’ll get it out,” Mac says, traces of desperation in his voice. “I’ll fix this.”

“Mac, it’s not your fault,” Riley says. “If it’s anyone’s, it’s mine. I should have known better than to keep trying and just spin us down deeper.” 

“It’s not your fault either,” Jack reassures her. “These things happen. How are we gonna do this, Mac? Thing's got to be about thirty tons,” he says. 

Mac is frowning, looking from the cab of the truck to the spot where the tire is sunk well into the sandy soil. And then he jumps up and rushes off. “Mac?” 

“He-he don't answer you,” Vasil says worriedly.

“Yeah, believe it or not, that's a good thing,” Riley says, her face still too pale, her hands still trembling.  _ She’s going to blame herself if this doesn’t work out. _ “Means he has an idea.”

Mac rushes up, he’s carrying something round in his hands that Jack recognizes as part of the air-filled cushioning the truck rides on. He shoves it under the axle by the tire and attaches something to it, then looks up. 

“Put it in neutral and turn the engine over.”

“This-this is going to raise truck?” Vasil asks. 

“Yeah, it should.” Mac stands up, brushing off his grimy hands again. 

“How?” 

“Well, it's basically the same way a firefighter's lift bag works. The operating pressure of the suspension airbag is multiplied by the surface area in contact with the frame, which gives you lifting force in pounds per square inch.” Jack’s noted that one thing Mac has seemingly forgotten is an ability to explain concepts in normal human speak.

“I-I-I don't follow you,” Vasil says. 

“Yeah, yeah, you get used to that,” Jack chuckles. “Basically, he means that the force of the air going into that bag from the brake line is going to push the axle up and left the truck out of that hole.”  _ I’m getting pretty good at being a Mac translator.  _ Mac smiles at him. 

“Oh, it's working! This is miracle!! “ Vasil shouts excitedly as the tire begins to rise. 

“It's just physics,” Mac says, but he’s smiling nonetheless. “We should be back on the road in five minutes.” He hands the man a mud flap from the truck. “You can help us. Dig out some of the dirt in front of the tire and lay this down for it to run up on.”

Vasil nods “Thank you. My son, he will be so so grateful, and my wife will want to make enough food to feed an army, just for you. I cannot wait to see them and tell them all about you.” 

“Devoted husband and father. That's a good man right there,” Riley says softly as she joins them on the ground. “I’m gonna go take a look at the road, make sure we don’t have any more unexpected visitors.” She hurries off into the brush.

Mac leans on the side of the truck. He looks wrung out and exhausted, and Jack can imagine why. Mac isn’t physically back to his full capabilities, not after how long he spent being mistreated and half-starved. He can pass his physicals, but he doesn’t have the kind of long term endurance he’d built up before. But it also looks like he’s thinking about something that’s hurting him more than muscle aches. “Mac?” Jack asks. “You okay?”

He nods. “Just thinking.”

“Thinking what? It looks like it’s a little too heavy for you, kiddo.” Jack shrugs. “You kinda look like you’re tryin’ to lift this whole tanker outta the ground by yourself.” He switches his comms off and watches Mac do the same. 

“Just...Vasil is risking his life to try to buy his son a little more time. He didn’t even know there was a medevac coming. He just wanted to give his child a few more days to live.” Mac sighs, wiping his sweaty hair off his forehead. 

“So?”

“James wouldn’t have done that for me. He would have written me off a long time ago, probably as soon as I got sick, if I was like Vano. And he certainly wouldn’t risk dying to keep me alive a few more days. It wouldn’t make sense to him to risk his life for a child who probably wouldn’t make it through the week, once this oxygen ran out too.” 

Jack sighs. “That’s because James is a world-class jerk who ought to have been castrated. Man doesn’t deserve children.” He pounds a fist into his palm, then flinches as his own words replay through his head. “Ah, damn it, sorry, kid. That kinda sounded like I thought you were a mistake.”

“I know what you meant, Jack.” Mac actually chuckles. 

“You’re probably the only good thing that man did or made in his entire life,” Jack says, shaking his head. “The only reason I tolerate him continuing to exist is that somehow, through some sheer act of God, that man is partly responsible for creating the most wonderful, kind, selfless person I know. If you didn’t exist, James would be six feet under right now, I guarantee you.” 

Mac nods. He looks like he’s still lost in thought. “So it’s only because of me…”

Riley cuts him off, running up, panting. “There's another rebel patrol coming.” Jack switches his comms back on.  _ Sorry Matty. _

“We must go now!” Vasil says. 

“Tire's still an inch below solid ground, Mac. You think we can make it?” Riley asks. 

“One way to find out,” Mac answers. “Riley, get in alone, drive it out if you can, and then we’ll get in. I have to fix what I broke anyway.” She nods. “The less weight in there, the better.”

“Are you calling me fat?” Jack asks, chuckling. “I think we oughta send you up in there, skinny kid.”

“Riley’s the better driver,” Mac says. “Besides, she’s already in there.” 

The engine revs, and the truck begins to roll forward, up the little ramp of repurposed mud flap and out of the creek bed. Riley pulls firmly onto solid ground, and Mac takes a few minutes to replace what he can of what he took from the truck. Then they all jump into the cab, and Riley pulls onto the road. 

* * *

TWO HOURS AND SIX MINUTES ON THE CLOCK

Riley shakes her head. Jack is humming the theme song to Smokey and the Bandit, and he breaks into song on the chorus. “We’ve got a long way to go, and a short time to get there. Just another good o’l Bandit run.” 

Mac chuckles. “We should have brought Mickey, he’d make a great substitute for Fred.”

“See, Riley, someone appreciates my taste in movies!” Jack says triumphantly. “Be glad I moved in with him and not you.” Riley shakes her head. “Hey Bozer, how long  _ do _ we have?”

“You're back on the road and have just over two hours until the oxygen at the hospital runs out. Since it should only take you ninety minutes to get there, I think we're all good.”

Riley flinches instinctively, then sighs at the sight of a truck that almost seems to have materialized behind them.

“Damn it, Bozer, why'd you have to go and say that?” 

“This is problem,” Vasil says, his voice trembling. 

Riley nods. Now she can see one truck in each side mirror. “Make that two problems. Mac, they're closing fast. Any chance you got a plan?” 

“Yeah. Riley, floor it.”

“You sure that's a good idea?” He just said they couldn’t risk sparks, and now with his work to get them out of the creek bed, _ my fault but I’ll worry about that when it’s time to make the mission report, I should have listened to Jack, _ the suspension is less sturdy than ever. 

“I don't know, but it's not gonna matter if they catch us,” Mac says, voice cracking slightly.

“Yeah, good point.” Riley guns the engine, swinging the truck slightly from side to side to keep the trucks from running up on them. “Not that I'm complaining, but why aren't they shooting at us?”

“They want our cargo intact. Liquid oxygen is worth a lot of money on the black market,” Jack says. 

The truck rattles violently over a rough patch in the road, and Riley winces as she hears low tree branches scrape across the top of the cab and trailer. And winces even harder at the sudden hissing sound that follows. 

“What's what? What's that noise?” Jack asks. 

Mac leans slightly out the window and peers back at the back of the truck. “We sprung a leak. I got to go up top.”

“Are you crazy?” Jack shouts. 

Vasil stares at him. “We are doing a hundred and twenty kilometers per hour.”

“Yeah, I mean, I'm not looking forward to it, but if I don't plug the leak, we're not gonna have enough oxygen left by the time we get to the hospital. And that's best-case scenario.”

“What is worst-case scenario?” Vasil asks. 

“Well, a stray spark hits the liquid oxygen, and, uh…”

Riley once again matches Jack motion for motion, sound for sound, as they mime an explosion.  _ This is what happens when you’ve worked together for a few years... _

“How are you gonna fix it once you’re up there?” Jack asks. “Cause I don’t think this is the kind of leak you just stick your finger in and hope for the best. Am I right?” 

“Good question.” Mac starts to rummage through his own bag and some of the other gear in the truck. Then he glances toward the back and frowns.

“Wait a second, that water bottle over there? Can you hand me that?”

Vasil grabs it and shoves it into Mac’s hand. “This? For-for why?” 

“Thanks. Liquid oxygen is cryogenic, which means it's stored below two hundred ninety-seven degrees Fahrenheit. That valve is so cold right now, all I have to do is pour water onto it, and, uh, it should freeze instantly, creating a seal.” He starts to open his door.

“Wait, kiddo, you’re not going out there with a bunch o’ trigger happy maniacs chasing us without me,” Jack says. He climbs over the seat and follows Mac out the door. 

“He say "should"?” Vasil whispers as the two disappear. 

“Be happy. That's as much of a guarantee as you're gonna get from him.”

* * *

Mac shudders at the feeling of the truck swaying as he scrambles onto the top of the trailer. Jack is right behind him, and that’s steadying, at least. Even if Jack is rambling about his favorite movie fight scenes that took place on top of moving vehicles. 

“Ooh, the one from Mission Impossible is pretty good too.”

“That was a train, Jack.”

“Still cool.” Jack looks up at the trucks still trying to find a way around Riley’s evasive maneuvers. One is creeping up a little too close for comfort. “Riley, on your right.”

“Guys, hang on to something.” Riley sets the truck swaying even more, and Mac clings desperately to the grating that runs along the top as a sort of catwalk. If he falls, he dies.

He digs the water bottle out of his pocket and begins inching along toward the hissing valve. 

“Mac, Jack, you're about to have company,” Riley says. “Someone just jumped onto the truck.”

“I got this. Mac, seal that valve,” Jack says. Mac nods and creeps closer, trying to ignore the strained grunts and heavy thuds behind him. Jack can handle himself. He’ll be fine. 

And then there’s a sharp pain across his own ribs, and he flies sideways across the grating, barely catching himself with his free hand. He looks up to see a second man standing over him. A boot comes down toward his fingers, and Mac cringes.  _ This is going to hurt.  _

But the stomp never comes. Instead, there’s a strained yell, and the sound of a body hitting the ground. Mac looks up again to see Jack leaning over him, frowning with concern.

“I’m okay.” He is. His ribs are aching, but nothing is broken. He pulls himself back to a safer spot, and quickly unscrews the cap from the bottle, dumping water over the leaking valve. Ice cakes over, and the hissing stops. Mac leans back with a small sigh of relief. 

“Leak's sealed.”

And then there’s a shout of anger, and Jack disappears. Mac gasps, staring at where the man was standing just a second ago. “Jack!”

There’s no answer.  _ He can’t have fallen, he can’t! _ Mac looks around desperately, then sees a hand clutching the railing along the side of the tanker. He reaches down to take it, and barely has time to realize the callouses he can feel are all wrong before he’s pinned down on his back, a knife to his throat.  _ No, no, no! _

“I think maybe is best to keep  _ you _ alive,” The man hisses through brown, cracked teeth. “Maybe we get more money, sell you and the truck.” Mac snarls angrily, and kicks out hard. His captor is taken off guard, and screams as he falls backward, this time unable to catch himself. Mac can’t bring himself to care if the guy survived the fall or not.

“Hey Mac! Little help over here?” A familiar voice shouts.

“Jack!” Mac rushes over to the other side of the truck, where Jack is swinging by one hand from one of the bars. “I thought you were gone!”

“Nah, man, I got Chuck Norris to outdo here, you really think I’d let myself get taken out by one dumb dude who got in a lucky hit?” Jack asks. “Alright, let’s go.”

Mac slams the door behind them after they scramble into the cab. 

Riley is still swerving all over the road, her face a frown of concentration. Mac notices that the window beside her is broken out.  _ Someone must have tried to attack her too.  _ He pities anyone who thinks Riley’s an easy target. “Ugh, damn it, I can't shake 'em,” Riley mutters through gritted teeth. “Mac, now would be a great time to do something brilliant.” 

“Working on it.” Mac digs through the equipment again, and in the toolbox he finds a road hazard flare.  _ Perfect. _ “Uh…” words aren’t coming right now, and he simply shoves the flare into Vasil’s hand. “Hold.”

He grabs a few more items and starts putting the makeshift molotov cocktail together. It’s not perfect, but it might be enough to buy them some distance. 

He strikes the flare, shoves it into the bottle, and then flings the whole thing out the window. There’s a crash and whoosh as it lands on the front of one of the trucks, igniting the whole hood. The truck swings wildly, and the second one crashes into it. 

“Whoa. Nice work,” Jack says. Riley whoops, then yanks the chain for the horn, grinning. 

Mac leans back in his seat, panting. “Okay. I think we're clear.”

* * *

ONE HOUR AND FORTY MINUTES ON THE CLOCK

Riley can tell Bozer is worried from the way he’s giving unnecessary directions.  _ He’s trying to help us the only way he can, because he wishes he was right here with us on the ground. _ “Okay, just stay on that road. It'll lead you right to the hospital.”

Riley looks ahead at the road, then down at the fuel gauge. “Yeah, until we run out of gas.”

“Uh, yeah, we just burned through all of our fuel,” Mac says. “We’re running on fumes right now.”

“Um, I’m no expert in this language, but that sign up ahead looks like it’s got a little fuel pump on it,” Jack says. “On the road to the left. Bozer, can you give us a satellite confirmation that there’s something there?”

“There is, but guys, you can’t stop there. There’s a truckload of armed men at that gas station.”

“Rebels?” Riley asks.

“Well, they just let a truck pass coming your way, so I don’t think so,” Bozer says. 

Vasil picks up the truck radio and turns it on, beginning to chatter rapidly. He hangs up and turns back to them. “I know the driver who passed through. He tells me about these men. They are not rebels. They are local villagers, whose homes have been destroyed in the war. They are making their money charging tolls at places like this, making drivers pay for fuel.” 

“Profiteers,” Jack says. “Think they’ll listen if we tell ‘em we’ve got kids who are gonna die without what we’re hauling? Cause I don’t know about you, but I didn’t come carrying cash.” 

“They have families too.” Vasil’s voice is sad. “Their children are starving, dying in rebel raids. They want to protect their own.”

“I understand, but there’s nothing we can do about that right now,” Riley says. “We have to get this truck through, and we have no money to pay them.” 

“Trust me,” Vasil says. “They will not let us pass unless I make it worth their while, and I will. But you need to get out of the truck. They will know you are foreigners, and they do not take kindly to outsiders, especially now. I can bargain with them.”

“Even if you do get through, how are we going to meet you? We can’t do it on foot.” Riley says.

Jack nods. “Mac, think you can Frankenstein a car together out of these wrecks?” 

Mac glances around at the two cars and the pickup on the sides of the road. The cars are pretty badly burnt out, but the truck was probably a rebel vehicle caught in a skirmish with actual troops. It’s shot to hell, but not burned. Mac seems to have come to the same conclusion. “Yeah, I can.”

“Then we’ll follow you. We’ll avoid the gas station and meet you on the road past it. Mac, make sure you whip us up a nice little off-road vehicle, will ya?”

Riley helps Mac gather some spare tires and a few other parts that he needs to start repairing the pickup. The radiator patch job, a combination of pine pitch, grass, and a couple birds’ eggs dropped into the water, won’t last them long, but it should be good enough to get them to their meeting spot. She helps Jack change one of the tires, keeping one ear on the updates coming through on her comms.

“How’s Vasil doing?” She asks. 

“I’ve lost him in a stand of trees,” Bozer says. “He should have come out by now. Guys, something’s wrong.” 

“Do you think the truck broke down?” Riley asks. 

“I don’t know. He and the truck that just came from the station met right there. Maybe it’s a narrow spot.” Bozer sounds distinctly worried. “I hope he didn’t get run off the side and stuck in a ditch.”

“Maybe I ought to go up there and see. That’s not too far away yet, right?” Jack asks. 

“Oh, no, he’s okay. Truck’s still moving. He must just have had trouble passing the one coming,” Bozer says. “He’s headed for the gas station now.” 

Riley hears the growl of an engine on the road. “Guys, take cover.” It could be the other tanker, but it could also be rebels. She, Mac, and Jack crouch behind one of the burnt-out wrecks, Jack holding his sidearm close to his thigh, just in case. 

A red semi truck rumbles past, its tanker almost identical to the oxygen carrier. The faded label on the cab door says it’s a milk transport. Riley waits a long time before the truck disappears around a bend before she stands up, slowly. 

They make quick work of the rest of the repairs on the truck, and then Jack climbs in, turning over the engine and shouting as it revs and begins to run. There’s a worrying knocking sound, but since this isn’t something they’ll need to pay damages on, Riley doesn’t actually care. 

“Okay. Tires are changed, radiator leak is plugged, and we ought to be able to at least make it to the meeting spot with the gas I’ve siphoned in,” Mac says. They pile into the truck, and Jack pulls onto the road.

“Guys, something’s happening at the truck stop,” Bozer says. “Vasil’s doing something with the truck. He’s not getting back in and driving away. Our sat view isn’t super clear zoomed in so far, but I think he’s handing over keys.” 

“He’s selling them our truck!” Riley yells. “That bastard. He made us get out so we couldn’t stop him from selling the tanker!”

Jack guns the engine, and although the rattling gets worse and louder, the truck speeds up. They pull into the parking lot of the truck stop and scramble out, staring at the men holding guns, and at Vasil standing beside them.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Jack shouts, raising his gun. Instantly, every one of the men with a weapon has it held at the ready. They motion for the others to move toward the small building beside the pumps, and Mac, Riley, and Jack slowly obey. Jack sets his gun down slowly, holding his hands up. Riley can tell that he won’t risk her life or Mac’s with needless bravado. But she hopes they can come up with a plan that doesn’t end with these guys taking the oxygen tanker. 

One of the men tosses a molotov cocktail through the window of their repaired truck. There’s a whoosh of flames that makes Riley flinch. 

“Damn it, Vasil, what is this?”

“Sometimes, we have to look out for ourselves,” Vasil says simply.

“Was everything about your son a lie?” Mac asks, voice tinged with pain.

“Not everything,” Vasil says softly. “I am going to save him. I need the money to do it.” He looks at the man beside him almost as if he’s hoping to be believed by them rather than his former traveling companions. It’s strange. But Riley doesn’t have time to worry about that.

“So you condemn all those kids in the hospital to die?” She shouts, and rushes forward. She’s not even really sure what she’s doing. Trying to take them off guard, give Jack a chance to get the upper hand, maybe. Anything to stop this from all going wrong.

The butt of a gun in her stomach makes Riley crumple.  _ At least it wasn’t the other end. Getting gut shot three times would just be unfair.  _ The crack of gunfire makes her flinch, and she looks up to see that Mac tried to follow her, and that one of the men is shooting the ground in front of him. Mac jumps back, flinching. 

“You bastards!” Jack shouts; she can just hear him over her own pained groan. The men shrug, laughing, and climb into their truck. One jumps into the cab of the tanker, starts it, and pulls away. Riley watches the shimmer of the silver tank through eyes watering from the pain in her stomach and ribs. 

“I am sorry. I did what I had to do,” Vasil says softly. 

“Get out of here!” Jack shouts. “Get out of here before I decide to shoot you. You’re lucky they didn’t hurt these kids, you know that?”

“But listen…”

“No!” 

Vasil turns and begins to walk back down the road, away from them. 

The flames lick up from their truck, and Riley sighs, laying her head back against the cold ground.  _ Damn it, we were so close! _

* * *

ONE HOUR AND TEN MINUTES ON THE CLOCK

As soon as the profiteers are gone, Mac rushes up to Riley. “Riley, you okay?”

“Yeah, but we just lost the only thing that’s gonna keep those kids alive. So not really.” She groans, staggering to her feet with his help, then leaning on a gas pump, panting slightly. “Let’s get out of here.” 

“Are you sure you don’t need to rest a little longer?” Mac asks. 

“Can’t afford to. We have to do something. Even if it’s only get to the hospital to tell them the truck won’t come,” Riley says. “Matty said the communication network went down, right? So they still think we’re coming with the oxygen.” 

Mac glances around at the vehicles littering the lot. “These cars have been cannibalized for parts already. And the one we had...is kind of toast. We can keep going, hope we find something fixable.” Mac sighs, then presses a hand to his side, where the burning pain is starting to become genuinely annoying. 

Jack frowns at him. “Mac, be honest with me, are you okay?” 

He shakes his head, pulling his hand away from his side. “One of those shots must have ricocheted. It just clipped me, I think.” He carefully pulls his blood-soaked shirt away from the small red line creasing his skin just above the thigh. 

“Damn it, kid, how do you always get hurt?” Jack asks. “Well, now I think we need to get  _ you _ to that hospital.” He shakes his head. “None of these cars are gonna work?”

“Not unless I had a few more hours and a full garage,” Mac says, wincing. “We’re walking.” He takes a few steps forward.  _ I can do this. Just stay upright, just keep going. It’s barely a scratch. _ But the long day and the fear and fatigue and most of all the crushing disappointment of failure are weighing him down. 

A truck horn honks as a vehicle pulls into the gas station.  _ Maybe we’ll get a ride. _ It’s the red tanker from earlier. Mac frowns. It should have been going the other way. He looks up. The truck is slowing in front of them, and there are two people in the cab. One is waving to them. 

“Vasil?”

He can’t believe it. 

Jack pulls out his gun. “You’ve got some nerve, coming…”

“Don’t shoot!” Vasil steps out, holding up his hands. “Come see! Is our tanker, look, see?” He points up to the top, and sure enough Mac can see the ice on the valve.  _ But how... _

“You know how I amuse my son in the hospital?” Vasil asks. “Sleight of hand. The children call me a magician.” 

“What did you do?” Jack asks. 

“I give them a tanker. My friend who tells me about these men, he takes milk from the farms in the mountains. They had already let him pass. So...He took my trailer, I took his. They have milk. We have oxygen.” Vasil is smiling broadly. “I tell you I save my son.” 

“Vasil, you are a genius. A crazy one, but a genius.” Jack grins. “And I learned a long time ago to just go with the kind of plans they come up with.” 

“It keeps cold, like the oxygen. They will not notice the difference until it is too late.” 

Jack chuckles as they all start climbing into the cab. 

“Mac, are you sure you’re not distantly related to this guy? Because that is exactly the kind of crazy stunt you would pull.” 

Mac just grins, then winces as Jack begins probing at his wound.  _ We’re still going to be okay. _

* * *

GEORGIAN CHILDREN’S HOSPITAL

TWENTY MINUTES ON THE CLOCK

“Move over Chuck Norris, there’s a new hero in town,” Jack says as he pushes open the doors of the hospital. “Vasil Khorava.”

“I am not hero,” Vasil keeps insisting, but a smile cuts deep lines in his craggy, furrowed cheeks. 

“Vasil?” Someone asks, a grey-haired woman standing in the door of one of the corridors. “It is you!”

The two rush to each other, chattering in rapid Georgian. Jack smiles.  _ We did it. We’re going to save those kids.  _ Mac is hooking up the tanker to the oxygen supply as they speak, and there’s still enough left to give the kids twelve hours of breathable air. Enough time to get the UN medevac to their location.

“Matty, what’s the status of that UN convoy?” he asks.

“They’ve run into some trouble on the roads. Unlike Mac, they didn’t plan to go into the mountains, not with their sensitive equipment and vehicles. And they’re currently pinned down on a damaged road, dealing with a rebel assault. They estimate it’ll be another five hours before they reach your position.” 

“Okay. We’ve got enough oxygen to last that long, and more.” Jack sighs.  _ But they’d better get here. _ He follows Riley and Vasil and his wife into the lung disorders unit, where the twelve kids are lying pale and still in their beds. Vasil sits down next to a boy who only vaguely resembles the photo, with his now emaciated cheeks and overly pale skin. Jack’s heart twists, remembering how Mac looked in the hospital bed only a few months ago.  _ I can’t imagine what it’s like knowing that your kid isn’t going to get better. _ He was afraid enough for Mac, when the doctors told him they could treat everything wrong with him. For something like this…

And then Mac himself is at Jack’s side. He’s too pale himself, but his wound has stopped bleeding, and Jack’s bandaged it. Still, he thinks now is a good time to get a little more professional work done on it. 

“Hey kiddo, let’s go get you looked at, okay?”

“In a minute.” Mac kneels beside the bed. “Hey, Vano?” The boy blinks. “I’m MacGyver. I’m really glad to meet you.”

The boy looks over at him. “You come with my father? You bring truck? He say you hero.” 

“You’re the real hero. You’re being so brave. And we’re here to help.” Mac smiles fondly at the boy, then at his parents. “Your dad loves you so much. He would do anything for you. He’s a hero too. If it hadn’t been for him we never would have gotten here.”

Vano smiles, his eyes closing again, one thin hand wrapped around Mac’s own too-skinny fingers. Jack swallows down tears.

Mac stands up, hissing when the movement pulls at his damaged side. 

“Yeah, it’s the nurse for you, kiddo, right now.”

Jack’s watching a young man with curly brown hair and a disarming smile stitch up Mac’s graze when the door to the exam room swings open, and the doctor he saw in the video rushes in, her face drawn with worry.  _ Something’s wrong. _

“How long did you say it would be before the medevac transports come?” She asks. Her blond hair is coming loose from her bun, and her eyes are shadowed with purple. She looks harried and tired and close to falling apart.

“Five hours, give or take,” Jack says, stepping a little in front of Mac. The kid had to take his filthy, bloodstained shirt off to get stitched up, and the hospital gown he’s wearing in place of it has a neck that’s low enough to show the collar scar Murdoc left on his neck. He’s been pulling at the collar since he changed, trying to cover up the mark. Jack figures the least he can do it give the kid a little more privacy in that respect. 

“It is not enough,” Dr. Nakani says. “All our life-saving equipment is on battery backup, but the nonessential parts of the hospital and the rest of the city use this. And the city has been in chaos so long...the batteries are running out.”

“How much time is left?” Jack asks. 

“Less than an hour, if we keep running all the systems at this rate. And we can’t triage any other equipment. It’s all vital. If we shut anything else down, other children will die too. Not just these.” 

“So we need a way to recharge the batteries?” Jack asks.

“Or to fix your main power source,” Mac says. “How long has it been a problem? Have the bombings disrupted it?”

“The rebels destroyed the main power grid, but there is a secondary source. Unfortunately, there’s something wrong with our connection to it.” And as if to reinforce the ominous tone of her words, the lights begin to flicker. 

“Hold on. Is that normal?” Jack asks.  _ I’ve seen movies where this happens and it never ends well. _

“I'm afraid so.”

“Great,” Jack whispers. 

“Where's your maintenance guy?” Mac asks, hopping down off the table and reaching for the clean shirt Jack grabbed him out of his go bag. 

“I will get him. I will come back.” The doctor says. In a few minutes she returns with a tall, balding man who speaks only Georgian. Fortunately, she begins translating for him.

“I need to see where this secondary power source is,” Mac says. They hurry down a set of stairs into a cold concrete basement. The walls are dull and water-stained, and Jack shudders. It looks like someplace people are taken to die. The maintenance man stops outside a heavy door with lots of red warning labels on it, and begins speaking rapidly in his own language again. 

“Beyond this airlock is a compressed air chamber, which the city uses to create and store energy for when the power goes out.” Dr. Nakani sighs. “Unfortunately, one of the connections to it is faulty. It cannot sustain enough power for us to trust it with the equipment. Everyone who can repair it has either fled or is dead.” She sighs. “We put out a call for aid from anyone who might be able to, but they are all gone.” 

Mac looks from the door to Jack’s face. “I have to go in and fix it.” 

“Mac, that’s suicide,” Matty says through comms. “There's over a thousand PSI in there, which is like being a half a mile under the ocean. If you go in there without protection, you won't last long.”

“And if we can’t keep the power online, these kids won’t last long enough for the medevac to come get them.” Mac says. “I’ll make something to protect me. But I’m going to need some help.”

He hurries back upstairs, and Jack follows, sighing. He watches Mac walk into the ward where Riley is sitting with Vasil and his family. From the looks of things, Riley’s heard everything over comms, and is trying to break the bad news as gently as she can.

When Mac walks up, Vasil reaches for his hand, looking up with teary eyes. “Is not your fault, MacGyver. Thanks to you, I see my son one last time.”

Mac’s voice is firm and determined. “Vasil, we’re going to save him. I promise.” 

* * *

Mac spreads out the list of what he needs on a table, trying to focus on the math and science it will take to save him. If he thinks about that he doesn’t have to think about all the other math and science that is telling him that if he goes into that room, he probably won’t come back out alive.

Riley and Vasil are busily working on pieces of the suit that should keep Mac alive. Jack, on the other hand, seems to worried too focus. 

“Mac, this is too dangerous. You can’t do this.” 

“Jack, if it was me in one of those beds, you would want someone to do whatever it took to save me.” Jack sighs. Mac knows he has him there. “There are twelve kids in there who are going to die if I don’t do this.”

“I know, kiddo.” Jack says. “Which is why you really should let me play hero this time. You’ve done it enough for one day.”

“Jack, this is my job. I’m the one who can fix a circuit on the spot with a gum wrapper, if necessary.”

“So can I. You showed me how, or is that one of those things you conveniently forgot?”

“That’s not my point, Jack. My point is that we have no idea what’s wrong in there, and I’m the improvisor. It has to be me that goes in.” Mac can’t deny that he’s scared. But so are all those kids. 

Dr. Nakani walks in, holding a green oxygen tank. “Okay, this is the last canister we have, and it's nearly empty. It'll give you enough to breathe for three minutes.”

“Is that going to be enough time?” Jack asks. 

Mac meets his eyes. “It'll have to be.” He nods to the helmet on the table. “Attach that tank to the helmet with that tubing there. I’m going to go suit up.”

Mac shivers as he changes into the clothes that should give him some level of protection against the pressure, under the thick layers of what is approaching body armor. The material is a vivid orange, and he hates that color. He feels sick looking at it against his skin.  _ Get a grip. Breathe. _

He steps back out of the corner where he was changing and meets Jack’s worried eyes as the man hands him the completed helmet. “You come back, you hear me?” Jack says. “You come back.” 

“I will.”

Mac walks into the room where Riley’s putting the finishing touches on the rest of the suit. “All right, so all this is to help you survive a room that might as well be half a mile under the ocean?” She asks, holding a section up to his arm to check the fit. 

“I mean, not forever, but yeah.”

“How?” 

“The same way an atmospheric pressure suit helps deep sea divers survive at the bottom of the ocean.”

“And that's what we're making?” 

“A quick and dirty version of one, yeah.” Mac suppresses a shiver at the thought of what happens if he’s wrong or something doesn’t work. It’s going to be a very painful death. “Okay, we need to get going. Is all this ready?”

“As ready as it’ll ever be. Let’s get you ready.” Riley and Vasil begin securing the thick pieces of protective plating in place, and Mac takes a few shaky breaths. 

“Aren’t you a little short for a stormtrooper?” Riley asks, but her laugh is thready and unconvincing. So is Mac’s. He can tell she’s trying desperately not to think about what happens next. 

“Okay, I’m ready to go in.” He walks down the hallway to the door and starts the depressurization sequence in the airlock that will allow him to enter. When the light blinks green, he secures the helmet over his head and turns on the oxygen. “Okay, three minutes starting now.” He steps through the door and begins repressurizing the room to equalize with the air in the energy chamber. The pressure rises, squeezing at him painfully. He groans softly, trying to bite back the pained sounds, but it’s not enough to keep them from being heard over comms. 

“Mac, are you okay?” Riley asks. 

“Yeah. Hard to...hard to talk,” Mac pants back.

“Save your breath, kiddo. Just fix that thing.” Jack’s voice is tight and worried. The pressure equalizes in the room, and Mac opens the door to the energy chamber.

At first glance,there’s nothing obviously wrong. The room looks like a breaker box, and as far as he can see, the mains to the hospital are switched on. The thick cables running from them appear intact. 

He works his knife out of the pocket he made from duct tape to hold a few supplies, and unscrews the panel covering the area. He traces the path of wires with his fingers, mumbling to himself, taking shallow breaths so he doesn’t fog up the inside of his helmet. 

“One minute and ten seconds, kiddo,” Jack says. “Get done and get outta there.” 

“Can’t. Haven’t found...problem yet,” Mac pants. 

“You’re gonna run out of air. And depressurization takes a full minute at least. You need to get out of there.”

“Not until...found it.” His thickly covered fingers brush over a disconnect in the wiring, and he reaches into his makeshift pocket for a paperclip. One falls the the floor, and there’s no way he can bend to get it, but the second one he pulls out stays in his clumsy fingers. He begins inserting it into the space, hoping it bridges the connection better than the worn ends of the wires.  _ No wonder the lights were flickering so badly, these wires kept shifting with every tremor and explosion of the bombings.  _

Sparks shimmer in the air, and there’s a glint like after a lightning strike. Mac stumbles backward, catching himself up against the wall. His ears are ringing, and a moment later he realizes that’s his comms shorting out. The electrical shock fried them. But hopefully that also restored power to the system. 

_ Less than a minute left... _ and then the soft faint hiss of cool air into his helmet stops entirely. 

Mac stumbles toward the door.  _ Just a little farther. Just a little farther. _ He’s so dizzy, he feels so tired.  _ I just need to rest, just a few minutes...NO! _ He forces his body to obey his floating, chaotic thoughts.  _ No, don’t stop. If you stop you die. _ He’s out of oxygen and the pressure is destroying his suit. He has to get out, right now. He pushes open the electrical room door and stumbles into the airlock. 

Mac can’t breathe. His oxygen is gone, he can’t pull anything into his lungs but stale, useless air. Not that he can get anything into his lungs anyway; he can’t draw a breath with the pressure all around him, squeezing in. His world is fading at the edges, going black and red and sparking like tiny explosions. 

He blinks back memories of the struggle to fill his lungs with something that wasn’t even air in El Noche’s compound. He can’t think about that. He can’t. He has to get to the door.

This suit feels like a thousand pound weight. He wants it off, but if he takes it off he’ll die. He glances down, trying to see how far he’s getting with each footstep. And he catches a glimpse of the orange under the heavy white chunks of the protective shell. The coverall he put on before the suit. It’s not exactly the same shade of orange as his prison jumpsuit, but it’s close enough.

All the memories flood back. The car trunk, the chair, wrists duct taped to the arms, which felt like a betrayal because duct tape is supposed to be his...El Noche grinning down on him, the mask, the nitrogen…the bedroom and the hands and eyes and the cruel hunger in that look... 

He can’t think, he’s going to have a panic attack.  _ Breathe in, breathe out...I can’t _ . He can’t breathe. The only way he knows to stave off a panic attack, and he can’t do it. 

_ How ironic will it be _ , he thinks,  _ if El Noche is the one to kill me after all? _ The man put a bounty on his head, but maybe the lingering memories he left in Mac’s head are more deadly than any hitman. 

He has to get into the airlock. They can’t get him out of this room, but if he can get in the airlock and release the pressure, someone without a suit can come for him. 

He stumbles. The room blurs, and the sterile white and blue and grey becomes a dusty tan and cream. He hears voices, laughter. Sees orange on his body, his legs. He’s trapped, he can’t move his arms.

He’s tied up...no, it’s too heavy.

He’s surrounded...no, he’s all alone.

He can’t breathe...he can’t breathe...he can’t breathe. 

Mac staggers a few more steps.  _ Get out. Get out. _ The oxygen deprivation is starting to kick in. He needs air. He needs air now. He can’t move, he can’t think, he can’t breathe…

His muscles are burning, screaming, from the weight and the lack of oxygen. He can’t move. He stumbles, the shackles on his legs...no, it’s just the suit...tripping him. He’s not sure how he ended up on the ground, but he struggles weakly to get up.  _ I can’t breathe _ .

He used to laugh when Harry told stories about how knights in armor, in the early days, would fall off their horses and not be able to get up. How they’d lay on the ground like flipped-over turtles, defenseless, struggling to get to their feet because of the weight of the armor and the clumsiness of how the pieces were made. 

Grandpa told that story to explain how people learned to make better armor, armor with more joints, lighter pieces. How people adapt and improvise and overcome. But right now it’s the stuff of nightmares. Mac’s suit is like that early armor. Too bulky, too heavy. It’s pulling him down. He can’t get to the door. He needs air. 

He makes a faint gasp and instantly there’s the weight of stale useless air in his lungs. Now he’s being pulled down from the inside and the outside.  _ I have to get out. I have to _ .

The thought pushes him to his knees. He’s almost to the wall, to the door. He shuffles over and clumsily bats at the door handle with one hand, like a dog trying to imitate a human opening a door. It releases and he falls into the airlock. But it’s still pressurized, Riley and Jack can’t open it. He has to release the pressure...But he can’t get up.

He drags himself to the wall, stares up at the lever he has to pull. Not even a button to hit. What an awful design. He’ll complain about it to someone...if he remembers, his brain is all fuzzy and his thoughts are getting tangled up. That lever is important, for some reason…

Oh yes. If he doesn’t pull it, he’ll die.

He sees El Noche, laughing. _ “I will show you how long I can make a minute last.” _ Has it only been one minute? He doesn’t know anymore. He wants Jack to come rushing in, to save him.  _ Last time, he came for me _ . But Jack isn’t in here now, can’t come in here now, and Mac will have to save himself. 

_ ‘Come on, you gonna let a little pressure keep you down?’ _ He smiles just a little at the Texas-accented voice in his head. Then staggers to his feet. And pulls the lever. 

The door opens. Something drags him out into the hallway. He glances up blearily to see Riley and Jack, and then his eyes slip shut.

* * *

PHOENIX MEDICAL

THIRTY-SIX HOURS LATER

Mac groans as he shifts position on the hospital bed, looking up at Bozer’s worried face. “I’m okay. It’s just joint aches now. They cleared me for flight.”

“Because they didn’t want to leave you in a possible war zone,” Jack says sharply. “And in case you forgot you were in a hyperbaric pressure control chamber the whole flight back. Like some freaky Star Trek lookin’ thing.” Bozer shudders.

“Don’t scare me like that again, kiddo.” Jack says. “Man, I do  _ not _ envy you right now. Decompression sickness  _ sucks. _ ”

“You speaking from experience?” Bozer asks.

“Yeah, one time when my Delta unit was paired with Steve McGarrett’s SEAL team. He pulled me outta the water after a really bad ascent. Probably saved my life. Course, I saved him afterward, so we’re even, but still.” He shrugs. “Mac’s wasn’t as bad, given he only inhaled a little more nitrogen than was good for him, but it still didn’t do him any favors. He’s not dyin’ but he’s probably gonna have a few days of joint pain if I’m guessin’ right.”

Bozer sighs. “Mac, you gotta stop doing things like this without me.” 

“But we saved all those kids.” There’s a smile on Mac’s pained face. “Vano and the others are in a safe hospital now, and Vano’s going to be taken to a research clinic in Switzerland once he’s a little more stabilized.” Bozer knows. Matty pulled a lot of strings while Mac was more or less unconscious in the back of a medevac transport, suffering from the pain of decompression. Bozer’s kind of glad they lost comms with him. Hearing the whimpers and groans through Jack’s comms was bad enough.

Mac winces, and another ripple of pain crosses his face. It looks all too much like he did after the nerve gas last year. Bozer can’t take it anymore. He turns and walks out.  _ I’m never there for him. He risks his life, he could have died, and I wasn’t there. _

He sits down in the waiting room, taking a few deep breaths. He jumps when he feels a hand on his shoulder, looking up to see Leanna.  _ She must have got back from Washington.  _

“How is he?” She asks. 

“Alive. He’s hurting.” Bozer rubs a hand over his face, sighing. “Mac almost died halfway across the world, and I was helpless. Again. I feel so useless, Leanna.” 

Leanna sits down next to him. “There was nothing you could have done for him even if you were there. You don’t think Jack would have stopped for a second if he could have done anything more to save Mac, do you?” 

Bozer shakes his head. 

“You saved them so many times before. You don’t have to be with them in the field to be a hero, Bozer.” Leanna holds his hand gently. “You’re a hero because it’s your nature, not because of what you do. And it was everyone on this op, working together, who saved those kids, and who saved Mac.”

* * *

MAC AND JACK’S HOUSE

“Ouch.” Mac shifts slightly on the bench by the fire, rubbing his shoulder, then his knee. “This sucks.”

“Who’s the old man now?” Jack asks, grinning even as he drapes a freshly warmed blanket around Mac’s shoulders, rubbing his hands over tense muscles. “Maybe now you won’t tease me so much when  _ my _ joints ache on cold mornings.”

Mac gives him a soft smile.  _ We survived our first field mission. And Mac only almost died. _ He can’t forget how terrifying it was to drag his kid out of that room, to see the bluing lips and limp body. To watch Mac suffer from the pain of decompression all the way across the border on bumpy, war-torn roads. 

Mickey whines and rubs his head under Mac’s hand, and Mac scratches his ears. “Fine. No more old man comments about achy joints.” 

“Thank you.” Jack grabs his own beer and sits down, ready to finally relax. And then Mac’s phone rings. _ Aw damn it. _ It’s not work, Mac has a special ringtone for that.

“Leave it, it’s probably a telemarketer,” Jack suggests, handing Mac a second beer that he’s already cracked open. 

“Nah, I’m gonna answer, just for the heck of it,” Mac says, picking up the phone and sliding the green button over. 

There’s a long moment of silence, and Mac pulls the phone away from his face, about to hang up, when the sound starts. 

Jack frowns. Someone is whistling, which sends a cold chill through his gut, but it’s not ‘Home on the Range’. And then he does recognize the song, and he feels sick. He slams his hand down on the table just as a too-familiar voice begins the chorus.

“Oh can’t you see, you belong to me…”

Mac is sitting frozen, and Jack grabs the phone out of his hand and hangs up.

“Was that…” Mac’s voice is trembling.

“Who else would call you and do the creepy whistle, dude?” Jack asks. “Damn it, I’m gonna kill him when we find him. That sicko.” 

And then Jack’s own phone pings. He’s afraid to look at what the text message is. But as usual, he has to. It’s almost like Murdoc has some freakish power to compel him to do whatever he wants. And Jack hates it. But he opens the pictures anyway. 

The first picture is a close-up of the scars on Mac’s chest, the deep, jagged ‘M’.

The second is arguably more terrifying. It’s Mac and Jack, sitting on the deck. And Jack can see, even though the picture is small and zoomed out, that Mac is wearing the exact same t-shirt and flannel he has on now. That photo was taken seconds ago. 

Mac’s phone pings with a message of its own, this one words that do appear on the screen for a brief second. 

**I’ll be watching you, Angus.**

“He can’t be right there. We’d see…” Mac trails off. “Jack, I think I know what he’s doing.” He grabs a pencil and paper. “Based on the angle that photo was taken at, and the distance it was to the house…” He’s doing his math nerd thing again, and Jack can only watch while the kid mutters and scribbles. 

A few minutes later, Mac stands up. “We have to go into the woods back there.”

“Oh no we don’t. Going into the woods at night is just...asking for trouble.”

“But I know how he’s watching us, and we can stop it.” Mac says. “Just trust me.” Jack grabs a flashlight and his gun, and follows Mac into the trees. 

It’s not too long before they find it. A dilapidated ladder that must have once led to a child’s treehouse. Mac points the flashlight upward and it catches the gleam of something fairly new and shiny. 

“Careful going up there, kiddo,” Jack warns as Mac starts climbing. Mac is the better one to go, he’s lighter and won’t strain the old wood so much, but that doesn’t mean Jack isn’t worried for him. He doesn’t breathe normally again until the kid is on solid ground again, holding something in his hand. There’s a soft click of a switch, and Mac looks up. 

“It was a camera. I just shut it off.” Mac holds up the camera. “He didn’t have to be here in person. He planted this, far enough away from the house that a sweep of the area wouldn’t really notice.” Jack shudders.  _ How long has that been there watching us? _

“Well, let’s take it to the lab. See if Riley can work her magic and find us a location it was transmitting to.”

“He won’t still be there. I’m sure he knows by now that we found this. Maybe he even wanted us to find it, sending that photo the way he did.”

“Well, it’s a start.” 


	5. Dia de Muertos+Sicarios+Family

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know, I know, it's NOT Friday! But I couldn't pass up the chance to post my Halloween episode ON Halloween, and I figured no one would be upset to get a chapter a day early... ;)

### 305-Dia de Muertos+Sicarios+Family

PHOENIX LABS

THEY LOOK EVEN STRANGER THIS TIME OF YEAR

Jill smiles as she walks around her little world. Every Halloween, she gives the techs free rein to decorate their workspace with anything that won’t blow up, catch fire, poison anyone, or otherwise interfere with their jobs. Some opt to just put a small plastic pumpkin up, like Matherson from chemical engineering. Others, like Julie Tyrell, have gone all out. Julie’s desk is nearly lost under a chaos of grinning skeletons, fake spiderwebs, an _ actual _ carved pumpkin, and several flameless black candles. Then again, Julie does research data entry all day, so she probably enjoys the slight variation in routine. 

There’s an unspoken rule about not using lab equipment for personal research, but Jill knows for a fact that Carmen is testing the tensile strength of polymer spiderweb substitute, and Alejandro is working on some flame retardant gel. She hasn’t brought it up to either of them. There are rules Jill is a stickler for in her lab, like not carrying anything with open flames around the area, and then there are rules she conveniently ignores at certain times of the year. 

Jill lets her lab coat billow around her shoulders like a cape, and the small mask covering the scars on the side of her face presses its edge into the skin of her cheek. _ Half the people who work in this building are scarred for life. _She’s seen worse on the skin of tac team agents she’s worked on gear for. True, it’s not nearly as common for a lab worker to take that kind of damage, but she also takes a kind of pride in the fact that she risked her life for the job like so many other agents. 

_ Besides, I adored _ Phantom of the Opera _ when I was growing up. _ And Mac’s discussion of their recent case in the theater district reminded her that now she can legitimately be a perfect Phantom for Halloween. 

She can see one more set of lab employees doing something she knows isn’t on the whiteboard of research agendas. Well, at least one of them is her employee. The other one is no surprise though.

“Mac, Bozer, what is this?”

Mac glances at her shyly before looking away. He’s avoided her since the accident, hasn’t spent nearly as much time in the labs as he used to. His desk looks pristine but unoccupied. She hasn’t seen him there in weeks. _ He feels guilty whenever he sees me. All he can think is that he almost killed me. _ She’s been trying to prove that she doesn’t hold it against him, but she thinks that wound will take longer to heal than her own scars. 

Bozer is a Halloween _ fanatic, _ and his desk is covered with his own special brand of creepy, monster masks. They’re relics from his movie days, mostly, but the set of three drying on the shelf now are actually for an op. They have agents infiltrating a costume party being thrown by a billionaire tech developer who may or may not be selling powerful micro-recorders to the highest bidder. Jill is impressed, Bozer went all out as usual, and the vampire, werewolf, and witch’s face look creepily lifelike, even just on their drying molds. 

But the project Bozer is working on now looks less like it belongs in prosthetics and more like it belongs in tactical armaments development. He’s got some sort of concentric-circle covered metal plate secured over Mac’s chest, and he’s fiddling with something on the side of it. 

“Now those diodes in the rings there will glow when I flip this switch, right?” He asks. Mac nods. 

“Wait, guys, is this...what I think you’re making?” Jill asks. She’s not the movie buff Bozer is, but one of her ex-boyfriends was majorly into comics and she went with him to several superhero movies. She recognizes this now.

“Ever since Chernobyl, Jack teased me that this should be my Halloween costume,” Mac says with a chuckle. “I’d hate to disappoint him.”

“Well, you would have with three different sizes of paper plates duct taped to your shirt,” Bozer says. “Trust me, this is _ way _ cooler.” 

“I know,” Mac says with a smile, fiddling with the straps holding the metal circle onto his chest. “It just seems like...a lot of work for one night.”

“Dude. That is the FUN of Halloween. Leanna and I have been working on our costumes for _ weeks _!” Bozer grins. “And no, we are not telling you what we’re going as.”

Jill grins, she watched Bozer working on that set of masks, she knows his secret. But she’s not telling. 

“Okay, let’s test this. And...it won’t actually shoot rings of flame, right?” Bozer asks.

“Just to be safe, let’s face away from the desk space,” Mac says with a grin, giving Jill a small wink as he turns away. She smiles. _ Bit by bit, we’re getting the old Mac back _. 

* * *

LEON, MEXICO

NOT SOMEPLACE YOU VISIT FOR THE ATMOSPHERE

Patty knows handling field ops personally is a risk that, as Oversight, she really ought to avoid taking. But still, she’s been itching to get out from behind her desk. She spent some time in the field when they were first hunting for Mac, but ever since then, she’s been trapped by the endless paperwork and red tape of bureaucracy. 

So when Cage’s report, on the intel James MacGyver finally decided to cough up, came across her desk, she decided this would be a case she would handle personally. Luis Gomez, the name James finally cracked and handed over, is the leader of the La Ola cartel, and just the thought of it leaves a bad taste in her mouth. That’s the cartel that owned Mac in Cali Correctional. The people who used him and traumatized him and tormented him. La Ola is tied up in far too much of Mac’s past. It was their weapons that he tried to blow up with the bomb that got him arrested. It was their murder that they chose to cover up by hiding the body in the rubble. It was their man who assaulted Mac in Bishop Prison, an op she wishes she could erase from existence. It was them, indirectly, that got Mac arrested last Christmas, and whose dirty feds almost killed him there. She hates them. And in a business where she’s seen some horrible, despicable things, hate is not something that comes lightly for Patricia Thornton. But she wanted to see Gomez pay for what he did to Mac in person. 

In hindsight, that was potentially a very bad idea. 

A very bad idea that’s resulted in her tac team down, her local safe house owner dead, and herself injured. The piece of glass in her side digs and shifts with every breath. She knows it’s not great, but also that for the moment, it’s not fatal. 

Her comms are dead, but the sat phone isn’t. Of course, as soon as she makes a call she’ll have to ditch the phone. La Ola is known for monitoring communication networks. 

She picks up the phone in one bloodied hand and begins punching in the numbers she knows by memory, her other hand steady on the grip of her gun. She doesn’t look away from Luis Gomez’s bloodied face even as she raises the phone to her mouth. 

“This is Oversight, code-in One-Zero-Nine-Alpha-Tango-Charlie. Requesting secure line access to Phoenix Command.” 

* * *

THE WAR ROOM

A FEW THOUSAND MILES FROM NIGERIA

Mac holds up two wires, close enough to the camera on the screens that Nasha will be able to see them clearly. “Okay. Now you're gonna connect the lithium battery to the condenser fan.” 

He’s made it a point to call at least once a week since he got back from Nigeria last time. He feels comfortable talking to Nasha in a way that he’s only experienced before with his own team. He knows she knows about his past, but she never makes it an issue. She thinks he’s worth caring about no matter what, just the same as she looks at the kids she teaches who have escaped lives as child soldiers or slaves. And it feels good to not have to lie and hide those pieces of himself around someone.

“You sure I won't get shocked?” Nasha asks with a small chuckle. 

“Well, not much…” Mac holds up his own slightly singed fingers. “It won’t do any permanent damage.” 

“I appreciate the honesty.” Nasha smiles. “Okay, testing now…”

She twists the wires together apparently without so much as a stray spark, and Mac wonders if his slightly shaky hands were to blame for his own little incident. He’s trying to lower the dose of his medication, with medical’s approval for once, but he’s not sure it’ll work. _ As much as I’d like to be able to stop taking anything, to go back to the way things were, that might not be possible. _ It makes field work a little more concerning, given that he needs to have a regular dose of something, but Phoenix has two diabetics and at least a dozen people with various severe allergies on active staff. True, they don’t get assigned long term overseas undercovers or anything, but they can still do their jobs and just carry what they need with them. And Mac knows Jack will always have an extra supply of his medication, just in case. 

The hum of machinery from the screen draws his attention back to the problem at hand. Nasha smiles, stepping aside slightly so Mac can see her finished build on the cooler. 

“It's working!”

“Yes, it is.” Mac smiles. “Now, give it an hour to cool down before you put the vaccines and antibiotics into it.”

“An hour. Okay. Thank you, Mac.” 

“Of course. I kind of wish I was there to do it myself,” he says with a small chuckle. “Maybe I should have taken you and Solomon up on that offer to stay as a teacher.”

“But you are happy doing what you do,” Nasha says, smiling. “I know you, MacGyver. You would be happy with a peaceful life for a while, but there will always be a piece of you that longs to be doing more, to go save lives and stop terrible things. And that is a good thing. It is needed.” Her smile is even wider.

Mac can feel himself starting to blush; he always does when she starts complimenting him like this. He’s saved from further embarrassment by the screen ringing with another call. It’s Oversight. 

“Nasha, I need to take this, okay?” 

“Of course, MacGyver. Thank you for all the help.” He hangs up the call and opens the one from Oversight. 

“Yes…” 

“I need you to listen carefully.”

Mac cuts his own words off at the sound of Thornton’s voice. It’s shaky and weak and not at all what it should be. 

“What’s happening?”

“I don’t have much time before they trace my signal. I’m in Mexico, I went after Luis Gomez.”

“The head of La Ola?” Mac asks. Just the thought of everything that man has done, and what his cartel has done, makes him shiver. He still associates La Ola, and thus Gomez himself, with the warehouse bomb, the Ramsay murder, the people who...he can’t let his mind go back there. The memories are fragmented, but it’s almost worse that way. 

“My tac team is down, and I’m wounded. But I still have Gomez. I need you to get Webber and have her route exfil to the coordinates I’m sending.” Patty’s voice is rough with pain. “I’ve already tried to reach her myself with no success.”

“Matty’s not in the office right now; she’s at an emergency meeting with the director of the FBI for a counterterrorism briefing on an emerging group.” She’d specifically ordered that she was not to be disturbed. 

“Then contact Roberto Garcia, he’s the head of exfil. Give him these coordinates and…” there’s a burst of sharp static and the call goes dead. Mac flinches. 

“Oversight? Thornton?” There’s no response. “Patty?”

He quickly scribbles down the numbers still blinking on the screen and shoves open the door, almost slamming into Jack. 

“How was chatting with your girlfriend halfway across the globe?” Jack asks.

“Thornton’s in trouble. In Mexico,” Mac says. “And for your information, Nasha’s not my girlfriend. We’re just friends.”

“That’s what they all say,” Jack shakes his head. “Okay, tell me everything. What has Patty gotten herself into this time?”

Mac is still walking rapidly down the hall. He knows that Patty losing comms on a sensitive op like this was reason enough to have an immediate exfil team routed to her last known location. But the chopper is probably already in the air, so the only way to guarantee the team gets the new coordinates is to hand them directly to the exfil manager. “She went after Luis Gomez.”

“_ The _ Luis Gomez?” Jack asks. “And she didn’t tell me? When we find her and save her, I’m gonna shoot her myself. I’d like nothing better than to put a bullet through that son of a bitch’s skull.” 

“I think that’s exactly why she _ didn’t _choose you for this op,” Mac says. “Gomez is a valuable interrogation target. If we get him and flip him, he could help us bring down the La Ola cartel for good.”

“Okay, I won’t put a bullet in his skull. But how about something nonfatal? Like a leg?”

“Jack, we’re not going to get anywhere near Gomez. I just have to give this to exfil…”

Jack glances at the paper as if it’s somehow familiar to him. “Man, that is a location in the center of the city. And with La Ola sicarios combing every inch of it, a tac team won’t be able to get within a mile. I’ll go down and do the extraction myself.” He reaches down and taps the gun strapped to his thigh, then tucks it in the back of his jeans and slips off the holster. _ He’s planning to do this undercover. _“Tell exfil they should reroute their chopper and have the team standing by for me to bring Patty to them.” 

“I’m coming with you.” Mac says. _ I have to. I know she wouldn’t have gone after Gomez herself if she didn’t have a personal stake in it. And that personal stake is me. _

“The hell you are, this is gonna be dangerous. That part of Mexico is crawling with cartels.” Mac knows. He’s been inside one’s stronghold, and he never wants to see another. “Kid, I know La Ola has a price on your head, and there’s probably a dozen more cartels who would like to see you dead.” 

“They’d probably like to kill you too.” Mac says. 

“Yeah, well, I’ll give ‘em a run for their money.”

“I need to come,” Mac insists. “You don’t know what you’ll run into out there. I don’t want anything to happen to you.”

Jack sighs. “Yeah, I know. Okay, fine, you’re just gonna do something dumb if I leave you behind. Which will probably be even more dangerous. But we’re not going in there blind.” He shakes his head. “I wanna know how the hell she knew where Gomez would be. And if whoever told her sold her out, and what kind of a trap we’re walking into.” 

“I know who would probably know,” Mac says. There’s only a few people in this building who seem to know everything. One is Patty. One is Matty. And one is Samantha Cage.

* * *

Sam looks up from her desk when there’s a knock on her door. She’s not surprised to see it’s Mac and Jack. She was monitoring Thornton’s mission from here, and when the comms went dark after what sounded like an explosion, she’s already dispatched an exfil team to the last known location. 

But she knows that her line to Thornton went dead, and that when Patty would have called in, she would have requested the command secured line, which would have taken her call to Matty, or failing that, to the War Room. And she knows who was in the War Room.

_ Trust Mac to somehow end up involved in this. _ She’d have gone up herself, but she has the feeling that there’s no way this would have gotten past Mac and Jack for too long anyway. She knows them too well. Besides, she’s tired of keeping this op secret, when it directly affects Mac. Even though she knows that’s exactly why Patty chose not to bring these two in, sometimes it worries her that Mac will think they’re trying to shelter him. 

“You’re here about Thornton, aren’t you?” She says. 

“You’re damn right. Patty went south of the border on a little harebrained scheme and got in trouble.” Jack frowns at her desk and the maps on it. “Wait. You were coordinating it?” He sighs. “Shoulda known.”

“I lost comms with her and her tac team twenty-eight minutes ago, and I know that protocol dictates she call administration to report any new information.” She says. “She and her team retrieved Gomez from his compound, but then they were ambushed on their way out of the city.” 

Jack’s hand brushes over the mission file before Sam pulls it away from him. “Where did she get the intel on Gomez’s location?”

Sam glances at Mac before answering him. _ If he hears that his father told me, he’ll start blaming himself, in that convoluted way he has, for the fact that Thornton’s hurt and trapped down there. _

“Sam. I can tell when you’re hedging.” Jack leans on the desk. “Who told her?”

“James.”

* * *

SUBURBIA

Riley knocks on the door of 3425 Maplewood Ct. with a casserole dish in her hand. “Hello, lovebirds.”

Leanna opens the door. “Tris! So good to see you!”

“You too, Rey. Where’s Justin?” 

“Oh, you know, he’s trying to squeeze in one more round of whatever game he’s obsessed with at the moment. Call of whatever.” She shrugs. “Come on in, supper’s almost ready.”

When Leanna closes the door behind her, Riley relaxes. “Wow, my face hurts from smiling.”

“Tell me about it. Playing happy couple is great, but not when we might have an international criminal for a next door neighbor.” 

“Hey, boss.” Bozer leans on the stair railing. “So, are we measuring up to your high standards?” Riley chuckles. It’s always strange to be in charge of ops, but this one was the sort where she feels confident that a wrong turn won’t be as deadly as it could be. Not that she’s ready to call any op a milk run. That’s practically a curse word. 

“I brought the large-format x-ray imager.” Riley lifts the lid off the casserole dish. “It needs to be set up with a clear view of the Kettner house, no obstructions.”

“Leave it to me. I’ve got the perfect place,” Bozer says with a chuckle. “I think Mr. Ghost might be hungry for some x-ray lasagna tonight.”

“My cover story was tuna noodle, by the way,” Riley says as Bozer carries to the dish to the hall table. 

“Well, you really do need to stay for dinner,” Bozer says when he walks back in. “Leanna and I went all out tonight. Our one-week anniversary.” He grins. “I made the famous family ribs, and Leanna has a homemade bread pudding that’s to die for.” 

“He knows because he kept eating out of the bowl.” Leanna smacks his hand. 

“What? That’s how I know what it needs more of!” Bozer protests, fending off the attack. 

“Well, despite the possibility of Bozer germs being left in everything, it still sounds amazing,” Riley says, punching him lightly in the shoulder.

“Hey, that hurt!” Bozer complains, but he’s still grinning.

“You haven’t seen hurt until I take you down in the training rooms. Remind me to schedule your self-defense skills test with me the next time you come due for it.” She passes him and walks into the dining room.

_ It looks so...domestic. _ She feels a tiny ache in her chest. No matter what, she was never meant to have a life like this. Not as a child, and not now. She knows it in her bones. Even if she and Billy make it, even if they make this work, somehow, through some miracle...this kind of life isn’t her future. But Bozer and Leanna might have a shot at it. They just might.

She knew what she was doing when she paired them for this long-term undercover. _ Maybe if I ever get out of the game, I’ll become a matchmaker. _ She knows Leanna’s been on the fence about taking Bozer up on his offer of sharing Jack’s old apartment. She wanted to see how they worked together in close quarters long term. 

So far, she’s impressed. With their surveillance and their dinner. She can’t remember the last time she ate so well. Riley’s enjoying herself immensely. This would be perfect…if she wasn’t on the clock for intel about Kettner. Matty’s been pressuring her to get them something. The FBI wants answers on who’s selling information to a Chinese terrorist group. They’re breathing down her neck, and she’s passing on some of that pressure to Riley. 

“What have you heard?” She asks, around a mouthful of bread pudding.

“All quiet. After a week of playing house in the burbs, we’ve still got nothing,” Bozer mumbles. 

“Not for a lack of trying. We've been on this guy twenty-four seven,” Leanna says. “But he hasn't left his house or made any unusual calls or had any visitors.”

“Spies tend to be careful like that. But if Daniel Kettner is stealing documents and sending them to the Chinese, I promise you, it's not through telepathy. Now, we need to prove he's committing treason so we can shut him down.” 

“We know,” Leanna says. “We’re doing our best.”

Riley wonders if she’s putting her team under too much pressure herself. She sighs. “Hey guys. I didn’t mean to make it worse. You’re doing great.”

“We’d be doing better if we could actually get some hard evidence,” Leanna says. 

“Well, with that x-ray imager, maybe you’ll have something new for me tomorrow.” 

“You’ve got to stop coming over so often,” Bozer chuckles. “I think Mrs. Jankowki across the street thinks I’m cheating on Leanna with you.”

“I come when you’re both home, Bozer.”

“She ain’t a spy, she isn’t paying that close attention. She got real snappy with me yesterday when I took out the trash.” Bozer says. “Although that could be because I’m technically violating the homeowners’ association rules about decorations and property lines.” He shrugs. “She likes Leanna. Can’t stand me.” 

“I thought everyone liked you, Bozer.” Riley chuckles. “Well, enjoy your x-ray casserole, and I’ll be monitoring you from Phoenix.” She stands up. “Good luck. Oh, and happy one-week anniversary.”

* * *

PHOENIX HOLDING CELLS

JACK DOESN’T LIKE THIS

Jack flinches as thick cuffs jingle against the metal of the interrogation table. Given the sensitive nature of what they have to discuss, Jack didn’t want to say it in front of the whole cellblock. No sense in cameras and the people behind them knowing how dangerous a position Oversight is in. 

He remembers, not so long ago, when he watched another MacGyver handcuffed to a table, in a concrete room like this. But there was a warmth and life in Mac’s eyes that James doesn’t share. His expression is cold, lifeless, heartless. 

_ He deserves to be here. _ Jack shakes off the thought that Mac never deserved to be behind walls and bars. Never deserved the suffering he experienced in prison. _ James doesn’t care. And we can’t afford to show the smallest hint of weakness in front of him. _

James ignores Jack and focuses on the occupant of the second chair on that side of the table. “Hello, Angus.” James smiles eerily, leaning on the table and scrutinizing Mac, eyes traveling from the messy, too-long hair to the high shirt collar to the fingers doing a trembling tap-dance on the cold metal, no paperclips allowed in here for obvious reasons.

Jack didn’t want to let _ Mac _ in here. The kid shouldn’t be subjected to this monster’s taunts, have to face the person who made his life hell. James should never be allowed to see Mac again. _ He doesn’t care about him anyway. He abandoned Mac, he should be kept away from him forever. _ But Mac insisted on coming, and Jack knows that the kid knows what he’s doing. _ Not that I have to like it, but I know he comes back to prove to himself how little James can hurt him now. _

“I’m not here for small talk.” Mac’s voice is sharp and cold. Jack can’t say he likes seeing his kid have to reach down into that part of himself, any more than he likes seeing Riley transform herself into a coldhearted monster for a cover ID. But he does think if anyone deserves this quiet, bitter anger, it’s James. “I’m here to find out why you lured Thornton into a trap.”

“Oh, so she did go after Gomez. I thought she might.” James says with a vicious smile. “I knew she’d bite for that one. After all, you all have such a _ long _ history with La Ola.”

“Shut it,” Jack snaps. “If you don’t start telling us something useful, you’re just going back to your cell.”

“And you think they really care about anyone, Angus?” James says. He frowns, glancing at Mac’s still-quivering hands. “Honestly, I’m not sure why you’re not in a cell next to me. What good are you to them like this?”

Jack stands up, a fist clenched, ready to send this guy sprawling. Mac’s hand on his shoulder stops him. “Jack. We need what he knows. Breaking his jaw won’t help.” Mac turns back to James, and Jack thinks the menace in the kid’s voice might actually be more terrifying than his own thirst for violence. “I’m not the scared little kid you remember,” Mac says, anger flaring through his words. “I’m not going to be shut down, pushed aside, or frightened into submission anymore.” His fist is clenched on the table. “I don’t idolize you anymore. In fact, I don’t even need you.”

“Then why do you keep coming back?”

“Because I don’t run away from my problems. I face them.” 

There’s a long moment of silence, of the two MacGyvers sizing each other up. A game that Jack is sure has only ever ended one way. But this time, he knows it’s time for Mac to win. And it looks like he will, because James finally sighs and relaxes his shoulders, just a little. “I have a deal for you.” James leans over the table. “I didn’t give Thornton everything I knew about Gomez.” 

“And you want to trade the rest for what, exactly?” Jack says. “We’re not lettin’ you out of this concrete box, and you know it.”

“Oh yes you are. Because I’ll only tell you what I know about Gomez if I’m on the plane to Mexico with you and Angus. You’ll only get what you need to know, when you need to know it.”

“We won’t agree to that.”

“Then I hope you’re happy with the last words you ever said to Thornton.” James says. 

Jack stands up and storms into the hallway. Behind him, he hears Mac call a guard to come in and watch James, and then footsteps coming after him down the tiled hallway. 

Mac catches up to Jack near the doors, putting a hand on his arm and turning him so they’re facing each other. “This is ridiculous,” Jack says. “He’s not gonna get us to agree to that and he knows it.”

Mac’s voice is soft and weak, like he doesn’t want to say what he’s about to. “I think he’s telling the truth. And I think he’s our best chance at getting Thornton back alive.”

Jack shakes his head. “Patty knows the risks. She wouldn’t want us to risk a dangerous criminal going free to try and save her life. This is no different from negotiating with terrorists. We don’t do that. All of us are willing to die rather than give someone like James what they want. Mac, if we let him out of here, we’re never gonna see him again.”

“I don’t think so.” Mac is pacing, shivering slightly, but clearly lost in thought. “Jack, we’ve had him in Phoenix custody for five months. If he wanted to break out, he would have done it already.”

“Wait...hold on there. You’re saying he’s been staying because he wants to?”

“It’s the only explanation that makes sense.”

“What makes sense is that we damn well escape-proofed his whole cell. And the cell block.”

“No, you didn’t. Last time I visited him, I counted over a dozen different ways that I would have broken out of that cell and escaped.” _ Well, if that isn’t the most terrifying horror story yet… _

“Why the hell wouldn’t he do that?”

“Your guess is as good as mine.”

“Maybe he still wants you.” 

“I doubt it, did you hear what he said when he saw my hands shaking?” _ Yeah, I did, and I want to strangle him for it. _ “It’s not me he’s staying for. But he does want something in here, and he’s not going to try and break out until he gets it.” Mac shrugs. “Whatever he wants to get out of this trip to Mexico, it’s not a chance to run.”

“Are you sure?”

“As sure as I am that he didn’t use the string from his jumpsuit as…”

“I’m gonna stop you right there, before you tell me about something completely insane I never want you to try, cause I got it. He hasn’t left yet, and he could have. So he won’t run on us now.” Jack sighs. _ Damn it, I thought our problems with him were over. _ But he’ll concede the point that Mac is right. If James wanted to, he could have figured out a way to open his door himself. Probably could have walked right out. The thought that he hasn’t because he’s playing a game is sickening. But Jack trusts his kid to know what’s happening. _ I want to believe James just isn’t as smart, isn’t as resourceful, as Mac is. _ But he knows that’s not true.

“He’s our best shot at getting Patty back alive.” 

“So you wanna gamble it all on his help?” Jack asks. “What if he hurts you again?”

“He didn’t hurt me last time. He let a bomb go off that hurt me,” Mac says, so casually it hurts. 

“So he didn’t hold a gun to your chest and pull the trigger. I don’t have any illusions about that man, Mac. If it comes down to us or him surviving this thing, I know who he’ll choose.”

“So do I,” Mac says. “And I know who you’ll choose, if that’s what it comes down to. And I trust you and your skills a lot more than I’m afraid of James and what he might do.”

_ And I’m so afraid that trust is misplaced. _ Ever since Murdoc got his hands on Mac, Jack’s been wondering if maybe he’s not the best bodyguard Mac could have. Jack’s failed to protect Mac from James, and then from Murdoc. And his poor kid suffered. He’s covered in the scars of it; Jack sees them far too often. 

“Come on, Jack. We’re wasting time.” 

* * *

LEON, MEXICO

THE WHOLE DAY OF THE DEAD THEME IS NOT A REASSURING VISUAL

Mac holds up the coordinates, then glances across the street toward the church. “This is where Thornton was right before she went dark.”

Jack sighs. “Don't worry, we'll find her. Even if I have to squeeze James’s information out of him drop by drop.” His voice is an angry growl, and Mac can see out of the corner of his eye the way Jack is holding James’s arm in a bruising grip.

_ He could definitely get away if he wanted to. _ Even though Jack has a gun, Mac knows _ he _ could get away in a crowd this size without getting shot first, at least not fatally. He had a few contingency plans back when going on the run for the rest of his life seemed like a better option than going back to prison. He knows Jack is smart and quick with a gun, but there are also ways to beat that. And if Mac knows them, James is certainly aware. But so far, he hasn’t given them any trouble. _ What does he want? _

Mac changes the subject before thoughts of escape turn to thoughts of prison and from there to memories of what the cartel did to him. “You're acting oddly calm around all this death-themed iconography. Shouldn't you be freaking out by now?”

“Yeah, while it is true that Jack Dalton gives a wide berth to all things supernatural, I actually love this holiday. Di­a de Muertos is a time to celebrate family and honor loved ones lost.” He smiles sadly, reaching for the dog tags Mac knows are around his neck. He’s taken to wearing his dads’. Jack’s are in Mac’s pocket. He can’t quite bring himself to feel comfortable putting them around his neck yet, but having them close is a comforting reassurance. 

“That's enlightened of you.”

“It is, isn't it? But, now, just to be clear, it's Day of the Dead, not Night of the Dead. I don't want to be messing around out here when the sun goes down, man. That's a whole different ball game. All right, we're talking chupacabra, La Lechuza, huh? "Nahooa" demons.”

“Nahua demons?” James and Mac suggest simultaneously. Jack grins at Mac, then glares at James. 

“Yeah, whatever. You don't want to mess with them, trust me. So let's just keep this daytime op daytime, you feel me?”

“Yeah. We're getting close.” Mac looks up at the church again. “Patty should be right in there, if those coordinates she sent are correct.” 

“Oh, a house of worship? On the Day of the Dead? That's fantastic,” Jack mumbles. 

“I thought you were good.” Honestly, Mac is the one feeling creeped out right now. There’s no way to know, under all the elaborate face paint, which of these people could be cartel hitmen or at least in the pay of La Ola. He’s been imagining the sight of familiar faces since they landed. He knows most of the people he was in prison with are still there, and those who aren’t are more than likely still operating in the US, but a mustache or a profile of a face will sometimes catch his eye and send his thoughts reeling backward to the fragmented memories of pain and humiliation. He doesn’t want to think about what will happen if he comes face to face with any of them. 

Mac starts to push open the door, but Jack stops him. “Wait. We send the expendable crew member in first.” He pulls his gun and digs it into James’s back. “This way, if there’s any freaky Indiana Jones traps in here, you’re the first to find them.”

James sighs, but steps inside, and Mac and Jack follow. 

Mac makes his way up the center aisle, stooping down next to the altar to glance at the floor. There’s a boot print outlined in blood. A tactical tread, approximately the right size to be Patty’s. He points Jack in the direction the print leads, and they all stop outside a door that’s been smashed off its hinges. 

“Ooh. Well, whatever happened in here, we certainly missed it,” Jack says. Mac glances around the room. A fly buzzes lazily around a puddle of blood on the floor, there’s a smeared handprint on the broken glass of one window, and an old wooden dresser is pushed up against what remains of the door. 

“Yeah. Looks like she tried to barricade the door.” There are bloody handprints on the dresser too. 

“Yeah. Emphasis on the word ‘tried’,” Jack says softly. “But just 'cause they got through the door doesn't mean that she's...um…”

Mac nods. James glances at the blood and the window. “Gomez and his sicarios have plenty of good reasons to keep your boss alive...for now,” he says. 

“If they even have her.” Something about this is telling Mac that they don’t. There was only one set of bloody footprints, and it led into this room. So unless the sicarios took Patty out that broken window, she left of her own accord. “I think she got away.”

“Hell yeah she did, Patty’s the best.” Jack says, looking around the room. He stops, walking closer to one wall where the plaster is chipping away. “Hey Mac, this look like writing to you?”

“Sure does,” Mac says. “Is that...Greek?” He shivers. It’s only slightly less creepy than it would be to see something written in blood. 

“Well, either the priest who lived here went cuckoo and started carving on the walls, or Patty’s trying to send me a message. That’s the Greek spelling for Athens,” Jack says. “Where we got split up, both wounded, and met up again in a scrapyard.” He presses his comms. “Hey Riley, where’s the closest junkyard?”

“There’s one a few blocks due west of your position,” Riley says. “It’s closed down, but there’s still a large junkyard that’s got plenty of cover.”

“Get me thermal of it.”

“That’s a little difficult, all the metal…” Riley cuts off. “But I’ve got something. Two heat signatures.”

“Well, sounds like she’s still alive,” Jack says, tucking his gun back in his belt. “Hang on, Patty, we’re coming to get ya.” 

* * *

JUNKYARD

AS GOOD A PLACE TO DIE AS ANY

_ It’s almost as bad as Athens. _ Sure, Patty has three bullets left instead of one, but that’s sort of being balanced out by the burning pain of the shard of glass dug into her side. _ Might be the end of the line this time. _ She’s still reeling from the close call at the church, and she’s sure the second she lets her guard down, Gomez is going to take that gun and shoot her. 

She’s pretty sure that’s what he keeps saying. Her hearing is getting blurry. The blood loss isn’t too bad yet, she left the glass in her body to keep it from getting worse, but compounded with dehydration and what she’s pretty sure is a concussion, it’s going to take her down sooner rather than later.

“Don't even think about it, Gomez.”

The man’s voice fades in and out. “All I'm thinking about is how heavy that metal must feel in your hand. Go on. Fight it. But that blood loss is gonna catch up. It's only a matter of time before I take that gun and empty it into your head.”

“Don’t say another word.” Patty jerks the gun slightly. “I could kill you with a clean conscience.”

“But you haven't.”

“It's what you know that's keeping you alive.”

“Are you sure? Or is it because you think a quick death is too good for me? I see the hate in your eyes. I promise, I will show you the mercy you refuse me…”

And then there’s a fleshy thud, and Patty blinks to see Jack Dalton standing over the fallen body of Gomez, shaking out his hand. "Ooh! Ooh, that felt really good. Really good. My fist has been wanting to meet your face for a long time, Gomez.” 

_ If he thinks he saw hatred in my eyes, he ought to take a good long look into Jack’s. _ This is exactly why Patty didn’t tell Dalton about this op. _ He would be only too happy to make Gomez suffer for what La Ola did. _ But she’s still grateful he’s here now.

“Really, Patty? I have to come all the way down to Mexico and save your ass?” Patty leans back against the ruined car, letting a small laugh slip out. It hurts, but that doesn’t matter now. “Nice work on the Athens clue, by the way.”

“As soon as I talked to Mac, I knew you’d come.” She lets Jack put an arm under her shoulder and help her up, still keeping his gun on Gomez. “Where is he? I doubt you convinced him to stay home.” 

“He’s at the car with...with James.”

“With who?”

“We had to bring him down, or he wouldn’t agree to help us.” Jack sighs. “Let’s get back there before he messes up my kid anymore, alright?” Patty nods. “You know, this is not where Oversight is supposed to be. I thought the job didn’t include field ops.”

“I’d rather flame out than rust out, Jack. You know that.” 

“Yeah, well, I’d rather you wait a few more years for Matty to drag me kicking and screaming into an administrative position.” Jack chuckles. “You know as much as she complains, she’s got her sights on me as the next director when she gets your job.”

“Oh, don’t worry. I’ve already taken care of a permanent note on your file that recommends you _ not _ be chosen for high-level administration.” 

“Thanks, Patty. My early Christmas present.” 

Patty gives him a small smile. “Jack, I know better than to ever let them make you ride a desk.” She’s had this good-natured ribbing with Jack since they’ve met. He’s as competent an agent as she could ever have met. But he’s telling the truth when he says administration isn’t for him. 

As a matter of fact, she does have the order of succession chosen. She wants Matty as the next Oversight, that much is clear. But she’s tested Riley in the role of Director, and the young agent’s soft heart almost broke her when they watched Mac suffer in prison. _ She isn’t the person who will be the next director. She’s so much like Jack. Can’t bear to watch something happen and not be able to help. _

And it’s not Mac either. Not that she doesn’t love him dearly, and hold him in the highest regard, but she would never force the kind of pressure on him; never want to see him have to choose the lesser of two evils the way she has; never want to force him to triage a situation. It would kill him. 

No. She knows who she wants in the Director’s chair when Matty moves up. Samantha Cage is a negotiator. She’s a politician. She’s cool, calm, and collected in the middle of crisis. And as long as she doesn’t take a better offer elsewhere, Patty and Matty have agreed that when the time comes, Cage will have the position offered to her first. 

She’s already been basically training Cage for the role. Working closely with her as another right-hand associate, giving her access to the depths of the agency. Samantha Cage is dangerous, but in the way that Patty herself is. In the way Matty is. She’ll take the reins well. And be able to make the hard decisions in a way few others in the agency would be able to bear.

But that doesn’t mean she wants to let that staff turnover happen just yet. “So, do you have a plan for exfil?”

“Unfortunately, they’re not gonna make it close enough. La Ola’s got men watching every road in and out, and none of our helicopters are gonna make it through the airspace around here. So we’re gonna find our own way out. But first we gotta get you patched up. The hospitals and the clinics are gonna be a no-go. Gomez and his sicarios are gonna be looking there for sure.”

Jack clicks his comms on, handing Patty a fresh set as well. “Hey, we need a little help here. Patty’s not gonna make it to exfil without medical attention.” 

_ This will be interesting. _ Patty’s spent her fair share of time in vet clinics and other unusual medical facilities. She wonders what this week’s will be. 

“Okay. I've got something that'll work, two blocks from you. Hope you've been flossing,” Sam Cage says from the other end of the line. 

* * *

DENTIST’S OFFICE

NOT EXACTLY A TRAUMA CENTER, BUT JACK’S SEEN WORSE

Jack keeps one eye on James and one on Gomez as the group stumbles into one of the exam rooms. Mac helps Patty get settled in a chair and starts looking over the equipment they have to work with, while Jack maneuvers his charges into a corner. 

James opens his mouth, but Jack cuts off whatever he was going to say. “Make a sound, man, and you’ll have a black eye to match Senor Gomez here.” 

Jack wants nothing more than to put a bullet in both of them. Each one of those men is responsible, in their own way, for ruining Mac’s life. But he also knows that’s not what Mac wants. 

“You should really do yourself a favor, and eat a bullet, before my friends find us,” Gomez says. “They will kill you, but the pretty boy, oh, they will enjoy him first.” 

“Yeah, you should really do yourself a favor, and shut your mouth, before I start pulling your teeth.” He wants to. How dare Gomez talk about his kid that way? It makes him feel sick to think of all the vicious taunts and jokes Mac must have endured in prison from men just like this monster. 

The door opens and a young woman steps in, her eyes going wide at the sight of so many strangers in the room, and presumably all the blood as well. “What is…”

Jack turns toward her, sort of forgetting he’s still holding two guns. 

The woman raises her hands, beginning to shake. “Please, don't shoot. I'll unlock the drugs. You can have my money.”

“What? No, no, no.” Jack turns back to Gomez and James, not really trusting either of them if he takes his eyes off them. “We're not thieves.”

Mac steps forward. “And we are not here to hurt you. This woman is wounded, and we need help. Is there anything that you can do?”

“I'm not a surgeon.”

“We have nowhere else to go.” There’s a pained desperation in Mac’s voice. “Please, help us.” Jack wonders if the kid ever pleaded with someone who found _ him _ hurt, trying to patch himself up somewhere. He knows that Mac had Carlos to go to, but how bad did things get before that? His stomach clenches at the thought of Mac’s hands being covered in his own blood instead of Patty’s, his voice shaking with pain instead of fear. He glares at James. _ In the end, what happened to Mac is on him, and how he treated the poor kid. _

Gomez frowns. “Maribel Vargas. Such a pretty name. There's a Vargas Pharmacy a few blocks away. Your father's, perhaps?”

“What'd I tell you? Shut your mouth.” Jack snarls. “Let's go now. The quicker we do this, the better off for everyone, am I right? Let's go.”

Maribel kneels down next to the chair Patty’s sitting in. Patty doesn’t look great. Her face is pasty grey, and her breathing is rattling a little, probably just from pain but Jack’s not sure. 

“She's got a shard of glass right there, and she's lost a lot of blood. I'll do what I can.”

“Thank you.” Mac starts scrubbing his bloodied hands in the sink. 

Jack doesn’t watch what happens next. Not because he has an issue with seeing that much blood, he’s patched Patty up himself. But because he doesn’t dare take his eyes off the two monsters in the chair. _ I watch a lotta horror movies to get in the Halloween spirit this time of year. _ But he doesn’t think any fictional villain compares to people like this. 

As soon as he’s done helping patch Patty up, Mac starts tearing equipment apart and making something. Jack watches him out of the corner of his eye. Whatever it is, it’s got parts of the x-ray machine, the drill, and some other random things. And then he runs off and comes back with even more parts, apparently having raided the next exam room as well. 

Jack shifts and flinches. His knees are aching, so is his back, and his eyes feel dry. He takes a few steps, walking up next to the chair where Patty is leaning back, still pale but looking less pained. 

“Hey Patty, how you doin’?” He asks.

“I’ve been worse. But I’ve been better.” She shrugs, then grimaces. Jack knows, he’s been there for the ‘worse’. They dragged each other out of a lot of black holes in their day. 

“Mac, what are you cookin’ up down there?” Jack asks. 

“We still have two miles to exfil, so I figured I'd build something to keep our friends over here in line along the way.” He holds up two identical-looking blue vestlike objects, and the remotes used to trigger the x-ray machines remotely. “It’s like a taser, but...wearable.”

“Oooh, like a shock collar,” Jack says with a grin, then regrets it as Mac’s fingers fly to his throat. _ Stupid, stupid, don’t talk about collars. _ He cringes when he sees that James’s eyes are following Mac’s hands. 

“You know, if you shorten the wires from the battery to the contacts, it reduces the resistance,” the man says. It’s not what Jack expected out of his mouth, but he hates it nonetheless. _ How dare you critique him? And what kind of freak gives suggestions on making something that will be used against them better? _ He wonders if the man is just so used to second-guessing Mac and shredding the kid’s self-confidence that he speaks up without thinking.

Mac answers cooly and calmly. “True, but I needed the extra slack to set the capacitors in series to store the charge. Those electrodes will deliver upwards of five milliamps into your chest every time someone presses the button.” There’s a tiny little smirk on his face as he works the vest over the man’s head and arms. “Why don’t you make sure you don’t regret teaching me so much, shall we?”

Jack jumps as his comms buzz to life. The voice on the other end is no longer Riley, but Matty. “Guys, you need to move. When the sicarios couldn’t find you at the hospitals, they’ve started branching out. There are two trucks headed your way.”

Jack looks up at the distraught-faced dentist. “Maribel, you need to get out of here right now. Take the next bus out of town. Call your family and tell them to do the same thing.” He frowns. “We gotta go. Is there a vehicle we can take?”

“There is an old truck. But you will never get past the roadblocks.” Maribel’s voice is shaky, but determined. “I will take you as far as I can.”

“You’ve already risked enough…”

“This city lives in fear of that man.” She points to Gomez. “And you are going to stop him. It does not matter what happens to me as long as you can save so many others.”

“Now that is the spirit.” Jack smiles. “Let’s go.” 

A few minutes later, they’re all crammed into various spots in the truck. Jack’s tucked up in the front cubby by the passenger seat. The floor smells musty and dirty, and he has a vivid flashback to being a kid and pushing the floor pedals in the farm truck while Cousin George drove with the steering wheel and shift lever. _ Momma tanned my butt for that. _ He figures if he gets caught this time, at least his behind won’t be sore for a week. 

The truck grinds to a halt, and Jack hears Maribel speaking rapidly to the sicario who stopped her. He holds his breath, hoping that the man doesn’t search the truck too carefully. But a moment later they jolt forward again, and he leans forward in relief. 

Eventually, Jack nods to Maribel to pull over into an alley. “Matty says there’s a ring of patrols ahead who aren’t letting any cars outta the city. Park this thing and scram while you still can, okay doc?” 

Maribel nods. “I am sorry I cannot help you more.”

“That’s okay. We’ll find our own way out from here,” Jack says, stepping out of the truck and helping Mac get Patty and their prisoners out of the back. 

Jack glances up and down the street, then flinches at the sound of his comms squealing in his ear. At the same moment, his phone lights up with a brief text, Cage’s cell number.** La Ola onto your signal. Cut comms. Go dark.**

“Damn it, I was afraid something like that was gonna happen,” Jack says. “Those sicarios are probably only minutes away.” 

“This city is full of secrets,” James says. “I can get us out.”

“You’d better be able to. Or I’m gonna regret bringing you along. And you don’t want that.” 

* * *

SOMEWHERE IN LEON, MEXICO

THE SCENIC ROUTE

Mac trudges along the street, keeping an eye out for any of the sicarios hunting them. So far, all he’s seen have been some mangy stray dogs and a lot of people in full Dia de Muertos regalia. 

He stops at the sound of Gomez’s voice from behind them. “You know, I know who you are, Angus MacGyver,” Gomez says. “I thought we had a deal. You and my cartel?” He smiles evilly. “Or was I wrong?”

“Mac, let me zap him, please,” Jack says. 

“Jack…” Mac mumbles. He just wants this to be over. And he hates that James is here with them, listening to all of this. 

“Oh, look at that, I think he’s grateful. Still knows who kept him alive,” Gomez practically purrs. 

“Listen, he doesn’t want you to talk to him, so shut up,” Jack warns, waving the x-ray remote for effect.

Gomez laughs. “Oh, he was eager enough in prison. Willing to do whatever it took to keep himself alive.” Mac shivers. He can feel Gomez’s hungry eyes, James’s judgmental ones, and Jack and Patty’s grief and pity. He doesn’t want any of it. He wants to be left alone. “How about a deal, _ Angus? _ I’ve heard you’re a good time. Prove it, and maybe, if you’re good enough, I’ll call off my men and let your friends leave Mexico alive.”

“Shut the hell up!” Jack snarls. “Maybe I’ll just shoot you right here.”

“Think about it, Angus. I could guarantee their safety. Or is it only your own life you’ll beg and plead and grovel f….” HIs voice is cut off in a strangled gurgle, and Mac smells the crackle of electric shock. Jack’s eyes are dark and furious.

“One more word out of you about my kid, and it’ll be a bullet.” Jack snaps. “Shut up. And James, if you so much as twitch, I’ll do the same to you. Alright?” 

Mac breathes a tiny sigh of relief, turning around to see Gomez pushing himself up from the ground with an angry glare, but with pain behind it. Jack looks like a thunderstorm. 

“Thanks,” Mac says softly as Jack, still growling a little, walks up to him. 

“You shouldn’t have to put up with that.” Jack gestures to Mac’s satchel. “You got some duct tape in there for that mouth of his?”

“Sure.” Mac rummages around and hands over the roll of silver tape. But when he steps back to take care of Gomez, James takes his place, almost before Mac is aware of it. 

James’s voice is a low growl. “What were you thinking, Angus? Letting people like that find ways to control you, find the weak spots and use them? I taught you better.”

“And what was Gomez doing with his money?” Mac snaps back, not caring who hears. “Just because he didn’t...didn’t use you the way he used me doesn’t mean he didn’t have a finger on your leash. Like all those other people you made weapons for. I’m not the only one who sold out to survive, am I?”

“But you never learn, do you?” James’s hand flies up before Mac can stop it, tearing at the collar of his shirt, exposing the ring of still-bright scarring around his throat. “Who left you that? You didn’t have it when you came to see me at the house, but you did when they brought you in later.”

Mac grabs the man’s hand and twists it behind him. “It’s none of your damn business who gave me any of my scars. You won’t go out there and find him and make him pay for it. Jack will.” 

“Oh, this is better than a telenovela,” Gomez chuckles, right before Jack slaps a strip of tape across his mouth. 

“You shouldn’t need him to protect you, to solve your problems for you,” James grumbles. 

“I don’t need them to solve my problems for me.” It happens almost without his thought, but the next second James is lying on his back, holding his jaw, and Mac’s clenched fist is stinging. “It’s just nice to actually have friends I can trust not to stab me in the back.” He turns to Jack, who is barely containing a full-blown grin. _ Sometimes my inability to control my emotions really sucks. Sometimes, it’s nice not to have a crisis before doing something I should have done a long time ago. _ He knows that a few months ago, he’d never have lost control enough to just lay into James like that. But he also would have let himself stand there and take the man’s verbal lashings. _ But that Mac is long gone. _

“Nice job, kiddo,” Jack says, and even Patty gives him a curt nod from where she’s leaning against a wall catching her breath. She hasn’t said much since they got out of the truck, and Mac can tell she’s tiring. They’re all hot and dehydrated, and she’s lost a lot of blood they haven’t been able to replace. 

_ At this rate we’re never going to make it to exfil. _ They’re going to have to do something different, and it’s going to need to be drastic. Mac shakes out his aching fingers and turns back to James. “You said you could help us get out of the city. Now start proving it.”

James smiles around a split lip dripping blood. “I thought you said you didn’t want my help. Or anyone’s.” 

“Mac, please, let me shoot him. Just let me do it,” Jack says.

“No.” Mac squares his shoulders. “I’ll find us a way out. Without your help.” He glares at James. “But if it gets you killed, don’t blame us.” He has a feeling James, as long as they’re dragging him around with them, won’t let them walk into a trap. _ He doesn’t care about saving us, but he doesn’t want to die. _ And Mac is counting on that selfishness to get them through this city. _ He doesn’t want to help us. But he does want to help himself. _ Mac turns so the man doesn’t see his small smile. “Let’s go.” 

* * *

Leanna leans on the kitchen windowsill, fingers wrapped around a mug of tea. It’s not nearly as cold here as it was in Washington, or Montana, where she spent most of her childhood. But for her, fall will always be the time to break out the sweaters and the treasured handmade mugs. _ Dad always said his hobby was throwing things. It really confused strangers. _

She fingers the smooth ripples in the sides of the mug, imagining Dad’s warm hands cupped over hers, slick with clay-slip and water, showing her how much pressure to use to form the ball of clay into the shape of a useful item. It always felt like he was forming _ her _ at the same time, passing on his lessons about the world and life while they got their hands dirty at the pottery wheel in the shed. 

Her throat is suddenly tight, and she blinks away tears. _ He would have been so proud of where you are now. _ But she might get fired if they can’t find anything on Kettner. 

She jumps slightly at the hand on her shoulder. It’s Bozer. “Morning, snookums.” He wraps his arms around her waist. The warmth is comforting, and reminds her of Dad. _ What would Bozer be like with children? _ She’s seen him on a few ops where they’ve crossed paths for a while with youngsters, and he’s always been both affectionate and protective. _ Probably because he lost his little brother so early. _

She hasn’t brought up the whole kids thing. That’s not something she felt like talking about when she barely knew him, and since then, it just hasn’t felt like the time. 

_ I want to say I want a family, that I want to raise kids the way my family raised me. _ But the truth is, she’s scared. She spent years in the foster system. And if anything happened to her and Bozer on an op...could she let that happen to her own children? _ I know it’s unlikely, that we probably wouldn’t both die, and that if we did there’s a whole family around us who would welcome those kids with open arms. But I can’t shake that fear. _

And she has no idea how Bozer would feel. Whether what happened with his brother would affect his future. _ When you lose someone like that, how deep does it scar? How much of yourself, of your hopes, of your dreams, dies with them? _

“What’s the matter, honey?” He asks.

“Nothing, sugar bear.” Some people seem to think pet names are cliche, but she never heard Mom and Dad call each other by their real names the whole time she knew them. To her, they’re a badge of two people who really care. “Just wish we could figure this thing out.”

“Yeah, me too. But what’s the worst that can happen? We keep living here like an old married couple? Is that so bad?”

She knows what he’s asking. If she thinks this isn’t what she wants, if she’s still on the fence about moving in together. And she is. Just a little. It’s a lot of commitment. A lot of uncertainty. But maybe that’s all there ever is in life.

Her computer pings, and she glances at it. “Well, look at that. Kettner’s awake.”

“Yay. Time to start the ‘watch suburban man live his life’ marathon again. Honestly, Mac’s nature documentaries about how plants grow are more fascinating.”

Leanna has to agree.

Eight hours later, and alternating turns on watch, they’re still no closer to any intel. But they have given out a lot of candy.

Leanna looks up as Bozer comes in the kitchen to refill the basket again. “Are you sure you’re giving that away to the kids and not just eating it all yourself?”

“Well, maybe just a few…” He grins. “But...is that chocolate I see on your cheek, babe?”

“Caught in the act.” She smiles. “Fine, but we’re almost out of candy bars. Just so you know.” 

“What? We even tapped into the secret stash?”

“Secret stash?”

“Oh come _ on, _ Leanna, I thought you were a spy.” Bozer grabs a chair, opens the cupboard by the sink, reaches onto the top shelf, and pulls two bags out from behind a row of spices. “And voila, reinforcements.” 

“You think of everything.”

“Technically, this was something Mama did. To keep us kids out of the candy before Halloween.” He grins. “I always ate the Mounds. But Jerry…” His voice goes soft and wistful. “Jerry wasn’t a chocolate fanatic. He liked the pink Starburst.” 

“And Mac?” Leanna asks.

“Mac would go on long scientific rants about milk chocolate and carbon residue and acid. He wanted to use it all for science.” 

Leanna giggles. “That sounds about right.” She turns back to the computer. “Hey, Bozer, look at this.” 

She enables the screen cast that will allow Riley to see her computer’s activity from the Phoenix, and switches on comms. “Check this out. I've never seen this laptop before. It's not connected to his Wi-Fi network, and there's no reference to it on any of his other devices.”

“A secret laptop he hides in his floor? That's exactly the kind of place you'd keep stolen data,” Bozer adds. 

Riley’s voice comes through tinny. “You guys are onto something.” Leanna watches her computer’s cursor start hovering on its own. _ If I didn’t know Riley was on the other end, I’d say it was possessed. _But it’s still weird to watch, like those remote tech support operations. “I think that’s probably the proof we need,” Riley continues. “But it's air-gapped, so the only way to get a look at what's on the hard drive is to physically plug into it.” She sighs. “Guys, since we have no idea what the security on that computer is, I’m going to come find a way to do that myself. I can be there in thirty minutes, tops.” 

“He leaves the laptop unguarded every time trick-or-treaters ring his doorbell. Halloween is the perfect cover for a little break-in,” Bozer suggests.

“Yeah, but he only spends, like, thirty seconds with each group of kids. Riley’s gonna need more time,” Leanna says. 

Bozer grins. “Okay, I got a plan. But I'm gonna need some backup.”

* * *

“Damn it. We’re never gonna make it through the city in this.” Patty winces as someone slams into her bad side. The heat, the smell of packed in human bodies, and the stress are not good on top of blood loss. She’ll make it, because she has to, but it’s certainly not going to be pleasant. 

“Well, we can’t exactly call exfil and tell them we’ve had a change of plans.” Jack mutters. They’ve ditched comms and cell phones after the worrying information from Cage. 

“There’s a small airfield on the south side of the city.”

“That’s almost directly opposite from exfil.”

“Yes, but it avoids us having to move through the heart of town.” Patty looks up. “We’re moving slow. I need you to go ahead of us and beg, borrow, or steal a plane, I don’t care what you have to do to get it.” 

“I can’t leave you and Mac with these guys.” Jack nods to James and Gomez. “You’re hurt, and that leaves Mac outnumbered.”

_ And Mac is an agent trained to take on more uneven odds than that. _Patty knows Jack worries, that he doesn’t think straight where Mac’s safety is involved. But this isn’t the time for that. “Jack. You’re the pilot. Get us a damn plane. That’s an order.” 

“But Mac…”

“I will make sure nothing happens to MacGyver. But if we don’t get a way out of this country, neither you or I will be enough to keep him alive, and you know it.” Jack sighs, running a hand through his sparse hair. 

“Damn it, Boss. I hate when you’re right.” He frowns. “Still sure we can’t send Mac ahead? He could probably build a plane outta shipping crates and rubber bands.”

“Do you really want to send Mac out on his own with a pack of sicarios hunting him? He’s also the only one who can fix those taser vests if we have to.” Patty still doesn’t feel totally safe around these two men, even with the vests keeping them contained. If anything happens to one…

“Fine. I’ll see you all at the airstrip.” Jack turns and jogs off into the swirling crowds. Patty turns back to the rest of her charges. She has to keep Mac alive. Or Jack will kill her. And she’s not exaggerating.

She starts to follow Jack, but the sight of men with rifles stops her in her tracks. _ Jack is one person moving fast, he can lose himself in a place like this faster than anyone I know. But we’re a whole crowd to ourselves. _And there’s no way Mac with his blond hair and pale skin can pass for a local. Neither can James. 

She leans in toward Mac, who’s now holding both remotes for the taser vests. “We’ll never make it through these crowds on the street.”

“Maybe we can go over their heads.” Mac nods toward a ladder leaning against a partly re-stuccoed wall. “We can take the roofs.”

He climbs up first, then James and Gomez follow. Patty comes last, that way, if she falls, they can go on without her. She scrambles onto the roof and stands still for a few seconds, letting the vertigo pass. But up above the sweat and smell of the streets, her head feels a tiny bit clearer. She looks down again, and that’s when she sees the light glinting off the barrels of guns. 

“Get down!” She shouts, and not a second too soon, as shots pepper the side of the building and send chips of clay spattering everywhere. 

When she pushes herself back up, Gomez is gone. She can just see the edge of something blue disappearing around a corner. 

“I got him!” Mac yells. “Stay with James!” He tosses her one remote and then dashes off, long legs eating up the distance between him and Gomez. Patty follows as fast as she can, pushing James ahead of her. There’s more gunfire from the streets, and now she can hear the thuds of boots on the roofs. _ They came up after us. _ She wills her aching legs and tired body to move faster.

She can see Mac up ahead, scrambling across roofs and jumping gaps.He’s gaining on Gomez, and she watches him take the man down with a tackle that sends them both spinning to the edge of the roof...just as a spray of gunfire shreds the wall where their heads were at level just seconds before. 

Mac pitches over the side of the roof, clinging to the edge with his fingernails. Gomez is lying motionless on the roof nearby, and the would be shooter looms over Mac, ready to bring his boot down on Mac’s fingers. 

Patty draws her gun in one fluid motion and fires. Never mind that sweat is stinging her eyes, or that her hands are trembling with fatigue. She knows the shot is good even before the sicario screams and plunges to the ground.

By the time she reaches Mac, he’s pulled himself up onto the roof, gasping and panting as he rolls onto his back next to Gomez, who’s starting to come around. Patty looks back. She can’t see anyone yet, but she can hear the shouting. It’s getting too close for her comfort. 

“We have to get off the roofs again.”

“That’s a fifty foot drop,” Mac pants. “That gives us a...ah...fifty percent chance of survival.” He glances around. “But I think…” He pulls out his knife, slashes off part of a clothesline stretched across the roof, and kneels in front of a vent fan “we can tilt the chances in our favor and use the exhaust fan to lower us.” 

He’s moving so fast it looks like muscle memory. Maybe it is. Maybe he got down from more than one L.A. roof with something similar, when he and not the agency had the name of the ‘Phoenix’. Seeing glimpses of the vigilante he was is always painful, because with it comes Patty’s memories of her first sight of the ex-con, walking into Phoenix in an orange jumpsuit with a lot of hurt and fear in his eyes. 

“Tie this around your waist,” Mac says, handing her what looks like an improvised climbing harness. “Make sure it doesn’t put pressure on your wound, this is gonna suck enough as it is.” He’s tied some rope around his own waist, and is doing the same to James and Gomez. 

They step up to the edge of the roof, all tied to a long line that Mac’s wrapped around the fan blade. He falters on the edge, staring down. _ He’s afraid of heights. _ Patty feels a twinge in her stomach that has nothing to do with her stitches. 

And then there’s closer, louder shouting, and gunshots rattle off the vent hood covering the fan. 

“Jump!” Mac shouts.

There’s a long moment of falling...and then the hard stop at the bottom. Patty does what she was trained to do to minimize paradrop impact, she tucks and rolls in a sort of ball that means her legs don’t take the brunt of impact and snap. Judging by the pained grunts and cries from around her, some of the others didn’t learn that. _ Well, they’re learning the hard way now. _ Her wound feels like some of the stitches reopened, she can feel warm wetness soaking into her shirt, but so far it’s manageable.. 

Mac groans, starting to push himself up and wincing violently, gasping and groning and collapsing back onto the ground. _ That doesn’t look good. _

“Mac?” She rushes up to him, watching as he grimaces and clutches his shoulder. He must have landed on it. She thinks she sees tears in his eyes before he blinks them away. “Are you hurt?”

“Just br-” he cuts off with a sharp inhale as he struggles to his feet again. “Bruised.” His face is too pale, but Patty doesn’t have time to argue with him.

There’s a click of a gun and Patty freezes. She looks up slowly to see a man holding an assault rifle trained on them.

“Vamanos,” he says sharply, gesturing with the gun. “Against the wall. All of you.” His intent is very clear, as is his finger on the trigger of his gun. 

“Rafa?” Gomez asks. He’s staring at the man, the duct tape that was once covering his lips loosened by sweat and hanging from one cheek. “What the hell are you doing?”

“Boss’s orders.” The man’s face is impassive. “You can’t be trusted anymore. Who knows what you told the Americans. Now…”

And then there’s a sharp thud, and the man goes down hard. Patty turns to see James holding a heavy board, panting and grimacing. Then he turns toward her. 

“Don’t move.” Mac’s voice is a harsh snarl. “Either of you.” He’s holding the remotes. “We need to go. Now.” James slowly lowers the chunk of wood, but his eyes are still locked on Mac’s. Patty can tell something has changed there. It looks like just as Mac finally broke ties and distanced himself from any real relationship with James, James has stopped viewing Mac as his son. _ But he’s still playing a game. And I don’t know what it is. _ Because he could have run. And he didn’t. 

“What the hell was that?” Gomez asks again.

“I know something even you didn’t, Gomez,” James’s smile is even eerier with the blood coating his teeth from what looks like the cut on his lip split open again. “Your right hand man is vying for the top. He’d like nothing more than to get you killed in the crossfire, and now he has a good reason that no one will question.” 

“How the hell do you know that?” Gomez asks.

“Because he asked me to kill you for him.” James says it casually, coldly. “I didn’t exactly get the chance to follow through.” _ But he ended up providing the opportunity anyway. _ Because ratting out Gomez, getting him in agency hands, means his own cartel will turn on him. Patty’s orchestrated similarly complicated political domino shifts herself. _ James is currying favor with the soon-to-be leader of La Ola, and with us as well. _ She’s well aware the man is a scheming, conniving son of a bitch, but this is proof. And he’s smart. _ Had to be, because this is what he did before. Got his paycheck from OPI and sold weapons on the black market at the same time. _ She’s going to have to keep putting him with Cage and hope to get something, to try to get a step ahead of whatever James wants. 

_ But if he doesn’t want to escape, then why did he ask to come with the team? _ There’s something personal he wants down here. Maybe just to prove it was him that helped the new leader take power. But whatever it is, she doesn’t like not knowing.

“You know they’re not going to stop coming,” Mac says. “We lost them for now, but it’s only going to get worse, and the sun’s going down.” 

Gomez looks up. “There's a cemetery. _ El Cementerio De San Pedro _. Years ago, when I first joined La Ola, I helped build a tunnel to move product out of Leon, it leads directly to that airfield you described. Months later, the Federales found it, and they shut it down. If we can get there, we can escape beneath the sicarios' feet.”

Patty frowns. “You're telling me that the whole time we were driving and running and getting shot at, there were underground tunnels we could use to get out of the city?”

“That was before I knew there was a target on my back, too.” 

* * *

Bozer glances from Kettner’s house to the mini vampire in front of him. “Okay, Calvin, you're clear on the plan?”

“For the billionth time, yes.” Calvin glares at him. “You know, you caught my dad right when we got to the houses giving out full-size candy bars.”

Bozer sighs, then begins making a sound like a truck’s reverse alarm. “Beep, beep, beep…”

“What are you doing?” Calvin asks. 

“That's the sound of my friend Matty backing a dump truck full of candy into your driveway as a thank-you for your sacrifice.”

“Dump truck?” Calvin looks skeptical, but he’s caving. 

“You heard me. You and your friends will be sick for a year tummy aches!” 

“Promise?”

“Oh, I promise.” Bozer turns him toward the house. “All the tummy aches. To go with my headache.” He’s only half joking. 

Leanna, on comms from the house, is monitoring everything. “Riley’s in position, Bozer, go.” Bozer walks up the steps and nods to Calvin to ring the doorbell. 

When it opens, Calvin yells “Trick or treat!” And Bozer hears Riley moving through comms. _ Nice. Get in, get out, and get the proof. _

Calvin digs into the dish of candy Kettner holds out. “Ooh. Cool. My dog loves candy. But he can’t have chocolate. That’ll kill him. Did you know chocolate poisons dogs?” Kettner nods, glancing from Calvin to Bozer, and frowning slightly. Clearly, he doesn’t want to have a conversation. But Calvin must be motivated by the thought of that dump truck of candy, because he’s seemingly unfazed by the lack of response. “Did you know the guy who invented Dracula, like, literally never went to Transylvania?” 

“I did not. You're very smart for your age.” Kettner’s voice is stiff. Bozer can hear Riley through comms, she’s mumbling to herself and he hears typing. She must have gotten access to the computer. 

“Mahalo,” Calvin continues. “That's Hawaiian, you know. My mom and dad took me to Hawaii last year. It was cool. Hawaii is so nice.”

Bozer tunes the chatter out for a moment to listen to Riley, who’s started talking in a whisper. “Okay. I'm seeing plenty of evidence Kettner's selling secrets to the Chinese, but these files are massive. Cloning the hard drive is gonna take longer than I thought.”

Bozer sighs. Kettner is already looking frazzled, the dish in his hand shaking a little as Calvin rummages through it, holding up two different kinds of Laffy Taffy and glancing back and forth between them with a frown. 

“And you know you can have both, right?” Kettner asks. 

“Well, um my dad said just one piece.” He tosses both taffies back into the dish and feels around again. “Lollipop. Don't have any of those yet.”

Kettner stifles a groan and glances at Bozer. “He's adorable, but I really have to get back inside, so…”

Bozer just smiles. “Actually, my wife and I practice something called "Free-Range Parenting". You know, we resist the urge to interfere in Calvin's decision making process, so he develops his own healthy judgment paradigm.”

“What's "high fer-ac-tose corn syrup"?” Calvin asks, holding up another candy wrapper. 

“I'm sorry, I really need to go back inside.” Kettner steps back from the door. 

“Bozer, I need more time,” Riley hisses. 

Bozer jumps up on the porch, catching the door in his hand. “Hey, did, Mr. Kramer tell you about the trash collectors? I mean, you think you know some-”

“I really have to go.” Kettner fishes a handful of candy out of the dish and tosses it practically in Calvin’s face. “Good night.”

Bozer jams his shoe in the door to keep it from closing. “Uh, excuse me? You can't just throw candy at my son. He has a nut allergy!” 

Kettner practically growls. “Get your hand off my door.”

“Don't hit him with the candy.” 

Bozer glares at the man, waiting until he hears the snap of a compute closing a few soft footsteps, and Leanna’s whispered “She’s got it.”

He steps back “Go ahead and close the door, then. You're closing it 'cause I'm telling you to close it.” He turns and walks back down the steps with Calvin. “Okay, Riley, I hope you're out, because Kettner's coming your way.”

“Uh...not really. He came up the stairs,” Riley whispers. There’s the soft creak of a door closing, and then all Bozer can hear is faint, shaky breathing. _ She’ll be fine. She will be. _ But now they have to get her out.

He knows Riley’s been in worse situations before. A lot worse. But somehow, it never gets easier to be part of the ops that go sideways. It’s like it was watching Mac run off to play hero at night. He got hurt, and no matter how many times he came home afterward, Bozer was scared every night. 

_ I know we’re a highly trained team of elite agents. But that doesn’t change the fact that one day, we might run out of chances. That someday our names could be on the memorial wall. _ He walks past it a lot, it’s the left side of the hallway that’s locked off that leads to the mission prep section of the building. Away from the eyes of visitors who are meant only to see a think tank. Who can’t know how many people from this building left and never came back. 

He won’t let Riley’s name end up on that wall. Not if he can help it. Not even if it means his own name does, someday.

* * *

THIS IS NOT THE FIRST AIRFIELD JACK HAS BROKEN INTO

BUT IT MIGHT BE HIS LAST

Jack scrambles over the chain-link fence and drops to the other side. 

This place looks deserted. He guesses it was a smuggling field that the police shut down, and no one has taken it over since. But they also left everything where it was, for the most part. Ahead of him in the gathering twilight are three small planes in an open hangar. Not much, but between them all he should be able to salvage enough parts to get one in the air for as long as it takes to reach L.A.

He wishes Mac was here, to chatter about the physics of flight and what he’d need to make jet fuel out of these scrubby weeds Jack’s wading through. But Patty’s going to take care of him, Mac’s in good hands. And as much as Jack hates to admit it, she was right about them needing this way out. Because they won’t survive the night in this town otherwise. 

He walks carefully up to the first plane, parked outside the hangar. It’s in bad shape, but possibly, the engine is still somewhat viable. He needs to check his parts inventory. He pushes up the cover, and the rusty hinges creak horribly. Jack flinches, but not because of the sound. 

Just audible in between the rusted metal creaking is the click of a gun. Very, very close to his head. And now there’s a voice. 

Jack’s mind quickly translates the whispered Spanish. _ Stop or I will shoot you. _ He holds his hands up slowly. _ Damn it, cartel must have found me. _ He turns around slowly to see the faint moonlight glinting on a metal badge and nameplate. This is no sicario. It’s a cop. 

“Who are you?” Jack asks. 

“Officer Enrique Cardoza. And you are under arrest for trespassing.” The man motions with his gun. “Get inside the hangar. Now.” Jack can see the man’s eyes roaming the landscape. Jack’s American accent probably convinced this guy he’s not dealing with a sicario, but for all he knows Jack could be a hired smuggler or a hired gun, and could have come with backup. _ He’s holding me hostage just in case. _

“I promise, I’m one of the good guys.” Jack insists. 

“Then why were you creeping into the fences like a thief?” 

“Because I need a plane to...it’s a long story, man. But it’s important.” Jack doesn’t plan on saying anything until he knows whose side this guy is on. All too many police officers can be bought off by cartels. If he hears that Jack’s partly responsible for Gomez being kidnapped, he could be handed over to the sicarios before he knows what hit him.

“They left a cop to watch the place, huh?” Jack says as the hangar side door swings open on rusted hinges. 

“No, senor.” Then Jack smells the telltale odors of candle smoke and flowers, and his eyes pick out the glimmer of a candle on a table inside the hangar. “I came to pray for mi abuelo’s soul. This is where the La Ola cartel murdered him. I was sixteen.” The way he spits out ‘La Ola’ sounds more venomous than ever the anger Jack feels toward them. 

Jack nods slowly. _ Well, then, I guess he doesn’t have much love for them. It’s worth trying to convince him I’m doing the right thing. _ “You know why I’m here? I’m an American agent and my people have Luis Gomez in custody.” 

“That cannot be…” Cardoza frowns. “The streets were crawling with sicarios today. The men were afraid to patrol.”

“That’s because of me and my people,” Jack says with a little pride. “Okay, so, do any of your grandpa’s planes still run?”

“Probably. No one has touched them in years.” Enrique walks over to the largest of the planes in the hangar and pulls a tarp off the engine. “This is the most reliable.”

“Well this thing has to carry five people to L.A. When's the last time this was actually airborne?”

“Ten years ago.”

Jack walks around it slowly, tinkering with the engine. There’s so much that could be wrong. Gelled fuel, mouse nests, ruined rotted wiring...

“_ Mi abuelo _ used it to seed and fertilize his barley fields. And sometimes he let me go up with him, but then men from La Ola came here and said the landing strip was going to be used for moving drugs. _ Mi abuelo _ refused.” He sighs, and looks toward the flickering candle flame. 

"Is that why you decided to help me? For your grandfather?" 

"For him and others. It's been a year since I joined the police, hoping to get some justice, but everyone's either in the cartel's pocket or too afraid to make arrests. You know, _ el mundo esta patas arriba _, when the police are the ones who must hide their faces. But if we can put Gomez in an American prison, beyond the reach of his corrupt friends, it will send a powerful message to the cartels."

"You know, I've encountered seemingly unstoppable evil on every continent. Evil that entire governments are powerless against. Sometimes it just takes one person stepping up to show a man like Gomez he's not a god.” His heart hurts remembering that that’s what Mac did in L.A. Took on the whole cartel single-handed to try and halt their reign of terror. And then he paid the price. “He's flesh and blood, just like me and you, and he can be taken down. You know, you're doing the right thing here, Enrique. I really appreciate it, and I take it back. I think this old girl's gonna fly just fine. I've flown a lot worse, to be honest with you.” He tosses the cop a toolkit and a cleaning rag. “Your _ abuelo _ ever show you how to fix these engines?”

“Plenty.” Enrique grins. “And I know where we can get fuel.” The glimmer in his eyes tells Jack it might not be strictly legal, but then again, they’re gonna do what it takes, and stopping Gomez and La Ola will help everyone here in the long run. It’s not like Jack hasn’t done worse.

“Thanks, man. You know, I think your _ abuelo _ would be real proud of you right now, for standing up and helping put an end to La Ola.” 

“If your friends can really get Luis Gomez all the way here.”

Jack begins ripping apart the old engine, his own tiny act of faith. “Ah, they'll be here. They'll be here.”

* * *

I can't stay in this closet forever,” Riley mumbles. It smells like mothballs and while she won’t admit to how bad it’s getting, it feels like she’s been here forever. She’s spent lots more time in lots smaller spaces, in much more dangerous situations, but this is sparking some of her oldest bad memories. 

The memories of Diane flinching at the sound of car tires squealing in the driveway, lifting Riley away from her homework and shoving her behind a closet door, of hearing Elwood shouting and breaking things, hearing the damp smack of his hands against skin, smelling the sour alcohol from his breath and spilled on his clothes. Hiding in fear of being found, unable to breathe. The door being yanked open, Elwood’s hand fisted in her hair, Diane’s pleas, her own panicked screams…

_ No. Snap out of it. Now. _ Riley takes a deep, shaky breath. She’s not eight anymore. She’s not a child. She can protect herself. 

“Riley? You okay?” It’s Leanna. _ She’s almost as good at picking up on emotion as Cage. _

“I will be, if you guys can get me out of here before the mothballs in this place make me sneeze and alert Kettner that I’m here.” She sighs, trying to get a handle on her emotions. _ Why is it so bad right now? _ She hasn’t even seen Elwood in a couple weeks, he’s job hunting. “What's the plan?” 

“Well, it's not ringing the doorbell,” Bozer says. He's not opening up anymore, so…” He stops. “Wait. We still have x-ray vision. Riley, I’m gonna be your eyes, okay?”

“Okay.” She takes a few more deep breaths. _ This will all be over soon. It’s okay. _

Bozer’s familiar voice in her comms is reassuring. “Okay, Riley, time to make a move. He’s distracted right now, on the phone in the living room. Exit the closet. Make your way to the front door.”

Riley does so, carefully, staying near the walls to avoid any creaky floorboards. Bozer keeps up a steady stream of chatter that’s oddly reassuring. Better his voice in her head than memories of Elwood’s drunken rage. “Oh, man, this is so cool. Just like Morpheus guiding Neo through the Matrix.”

Riley manages a small smile and a tight whisper. “Yeah. I'm glad you're having fun, Bozer.”

But the next second, his voice is laced with pure terror. “Wait, wait, wait! Hide! Riley, he has a gun.”

She doesn’t know if it was her whisper, or just that Kettner is hypersensitive to anything happening in his house. She knows it was this way with Jack at first; she broke into his apartment their first year working as a team to leave him a Christmas gift, and despite the fact that she was a fully trained operative, Jack almost shot her. Dangerous work breeds paranoia.

She ducks around a corner into a guest room, slipping behind the door. The hinges creak slightly, and she flinches.

She can hear Leanna on comms. “Bozer, do something.” Kettner is getting closer, his footsteps are coming directly for the door. She fingers the tac knife hidden in her belt. Not the most effective against a gun in normal circumstances, but she’ll have close quarters and the element of surprise on her side, and in that case a knife is the more effective weapon. _ Jack always said guns are for long range, blades are when you wanna get personal. _

The door begins to creak open, and Riley readies her fighting stance, the knife gripped in her hand the way Jack showed her. _ One slice to disarm, then all I have to do is get to his throat. _

But Kettner never walks into the room. Riley flinches as the near silence of the house is broken by the sound of shattering glass and the scream of a car alarm. She drops the knife to the carpet and covers her ears, she’s nine years old again and Elwood is throwing things. And she can’t let him see her…

She takes a deeper, shaky breath as the sounds continue, and realizes she can hear a faint argument from outside that’s echoed on her comms. 

Kettner is shouting. “Hey! What the hell is your problem?!” 

“Teaching you a lesson! Tree nut allergies are serious business!” There’s another crash. This time Riley doesn’t flinch. She grabs her knife and rushes to the nearest window, prying it open and tumbling out. 

Kettner is still shouting. “Are you insane?! Look what you just did to my car.”

Riley leans against the side of Bozer’s house, still panting. “Bozer, I'm out.”

Bozer’s voice instantly changes. “You know what? I overreacted. My bad. My insurance will take care of all of this. Happy Halloween.”

Riley steps inside, letting out a deep sigh of relief and dropping her hard drive copy onto the kitchen counter. Leanna takes one look at her face, then reaches for Riley’s shaking hands. “What happened in there?”

“I was gonna wait him out,” Riley whispers. “Let him go to sleep. But the closet...all I could see was my dad, drunk and screaming, and my mom shoving me behind doors to keep me safe.” Normally, she wouldn’t spill her secrets like this, but Leanna’s come to feel like a sister, in a way. And Riley needs to get this off her chest, and Jack’s not here. “I had to get out before the flashbacks got worse.”

“I’m so sorry.” Leanna’s hands are warm on hers, and Riley nods. _ PTSD is the norm for this job. But everyone expects it to come from our missions, the scars to come from foreign enemy agents. _ And often it’s easier to let people believe the lie than to tell them the truth. But not tonight.

And then Bozer bursts through the door, a baseball bat in his hands. “Whooo yeah!” He drops the bat against the coat rack. “Alright! Now who’s in the mood for a bad monster movie marathon?”

Riley chuckles, starting to feel the past release its vise grip on her heart. “Sounds like a winner to me.” 

* * *

EL CEMENTERIO DE SAN PEDRO

JACK WOULD BE FREAKING OUT RIGHT NOW

Mac shivers. It’s just his imagination, and he knows it, but the candle smoke drifting between graves looks like ghosts, and the painted skeletal faces on the people gathered to mourn their dead are eerily glowing. 

_ Jack, this is all your fault for making us watch horror movies when I can’t sleep. _ Honestly, they’re oddly reassuring, mostly because Mac is always capable of pointing out the really stupid things the characters do, and how it would be so easy not to die. _ It’s something I can scrutinize that doesn’t affect me like the field. _ They steer clear of most of the really creepy or gory stuff, but Jack has a fondness for the kind of b-movies Bozer used to try to make, and sometimes Mac finds himself critiquing the makeup and special effects more than the forced plotlines. _ Bozer’s work was so much better. _

“How far to the tunnels?” Thornton’s voice is strained and a little weaker than it was last time she spoke. Mac knows they need to get out of here soon. 

“Not far,” Gomex says. “We'll access them through the mausoleum up ahead. Once we're below ground, we're home free.”

“So whose desecrated final resting spot are we keeping our eyes peeled for?” Mac asks, a little sardonically. He’s tired and thirsty and his whole shoulder hurts, and somehow he feels like he’s filling in for Jack, who _ definitely _would have said something like that. So…

Someone slams into him, right into his bad shoulder, and he bites back a cry of pain. 

“Perdon,” Someone says, and then dark eyes in a painted face lock onto Mac’s. And he knows this is someone who wants to hurt them. He dodges aside, pain forgotten in a sudden burst of adrenaline. 

“This way!” He leads the way through the confused, angry crowd toward a low stone building, James and Gomez behind him, Thornton bringing up the rear. He stops and turns back when he hears Thornton’s shout of anger and pain, and sees two men converging on her, a third coming up through a gap in the crowd. 

“Go! Get out of here!” Patty’s taking on all three of these guys at once. Mac’s stomach leaps into his throat, he knows she can’t do this for long. She’s wounded and exhausted. But if this is the last thing she does, he can’t let it be for nothing. 

“Come on! We have to go now!” He pushes James and Gomez into the mausoleum. “Where’s the door?”

Gomez pulls on one of the flat stones set into the wall, with the name, birth and death dates of a child carved on it. The stone doesn’t move. 

“The police. They sealed it.” Mac pulls out his knife and begins chipping away at the cement around the edges of the stone. Fortunately, it was a hasty job that hasn’t held up to the strain of years, and the cement crumbles away in handfuls. Finally, they’re able to pull out the stone, release the latch behind it, and scramble down into the tunnels.

Mac holds up the candle he snatched from a wall niche and looks around. 

“This way,” Gomez says, moving forward down the hallway that is so low he has to bend slightly for it to accommodate him. They walk in silence for another few minutes before they reach a fork in the path. Mac stops, holding up the candle again, and Gomez points to the right. 

“How much longer?” James asks, sounding frustrated. Mac knows that tone all too well. 

“Less than a kilometer.”

And then a breeze flickers down the tunnel, and Mac’s candle goes out in a puff. 

“Someone opened another entrance,” he whispers. “They're in the tunnels.”

He wastes a few precious moments searching for a stone on the floor. He can’t see in the dark at all, and he doesn’t have his phone for the flashlight anymore. He finally finds something that feels right, it’s so hard to tell in the dark, and begins striking it against his knife. 

“It's limestone,” James says, and there’s the old bitterness in his voice, the sound of disappointment in Mac’s work. 

“You couldn't possibly know that,” Mac snaps. 

“The soil and mineral composition of this area mean that limestone is the most common rock…”

“It's flint.”

“No. It's not. It's not gonna light.” 

And then a spark flares up, and Mac smiles in the sudden glow. _ Too bad I didn’t have the guts to keep trying things after you criticized me a long time ago. _ He used to give up when James said he was doing something wrong. Now, he has confidence in himself. _ I wonder how many times my way would have worked but he stopped me? _ He’s not going to let it happen again.

“You were saying?”

For once, James doesn’t say anything. Maybe he knows that Mac’s fist is coiled and ready to strike if he does. _ It wouldn’t break my heart to leave him for the cartel. _But Mac isn’t his father. 

There’s a thud of footsteps in the tunnel, and Gomez looks worried. “It won't be long before those men finds us. We need to hurry!”

Mac shakes his head. They can’t hope to outrun these guys. But they can take them by surprise.

He really, really hates the idea of trusting either James or Gomez with anything that could be considered a weapon. He’s outnumbered now, and he’s afraid the taser vests have run out of power. Nothing about this situation is good. But if he doesn’t do something, then they’re all going to be captured by the sicarios, and Mac is well aware his death will be slow and painful. After all, half of La Ola know exactly who he is, and what he did to their LA operations. 

He decides Gomez is actually the one he trusts more. James is too opportunistic, too likely to want to flip this to show himself helping the new leader gain power. Gomez, on the other hand, is a guaranteed dead man if he’s caught. Mac hands Gomez a short chunk of wood. 

“They’re going to have some sort of night vision, right?” He asks. La Ola seemed to like playing with fancy tech. Gomez nods. “Then when they come around the corner, I’m going to use the candle light to blind them, and then I need you to take them out fast.” Gomez nods again.

When the first sicario comes around the corner, Mac’s ready. He holds up the candle and hears the man yell hoarsely as he’s blinded by the light (and he forces himself to ignore the Jack voice in his head that instantly begins belting out a classic rock chorus). The shouts cut off abruptly as Gomez slams the wood against the man’s head.

There’s more shouting from down the tunnels. The other men must have heard their leader in trouble. Mac yanks the night vision goggles off the man’s face and hands them to Gomez, then grabs a grenade off the man’s belt and glances at the tunnel support beams.

“Go. get out of here, go straight to the airfield. I’ll be right behind you.” He means it to sound like a threat, to make Gomez and James comply. But he can hear the crack in his voice. 

_ I don’t want to die protecting them. But I also would rather die than let those sicarios get their hands on me. _

He looks back up at the support beam, thinking through this terrible plan one last time. _ Jack will be pissed. _ If Jack was here right now, he’d make Mac stop. But he’s not here. And Mac can’t let the sicarios catch him either. 

_ Underground tunnels, even crude ones, are actually complex engineering feats.For every foot below the surface you go, there's a quarter ton of rock and dirt above your head, which makes causing a collapse as easy as pouring candle wax on a grenade and adhering it to a support beam. The tricky part is being somewhere else when it all comes down. _

Mac sets the grenade, pulls the pin, and runs. But in the dark, he stumbles over the uneven tunnel floor, catching himself against the wall. And then there’s no more time. 

Mac’s world is a chaos of dust and falling stones and pain. And then it all goes black. 

* * *

AIRFIELD

HOPEFULLY JACK HAS A PLANE READY

Patty scrambles over the fence, wincing as she feels more stitches tear. She knows she’s spent, almost dead on her feet right now. But she’s survived worse. This is nothing compared to being almost gutted in Angola and hiking through the desert to exfil. It probably won’t leave even half as impressive a scar. 

She can see light and movement next to one of three beat-up planes, and she crouches in hte weeds until she hears a familiar Texas accent.

“Thanks, man,” Jack says. “I think if your _ abuelo _’s watching us tonight, he’s smiling.” 

There’s something else said, that Patty can’t quite catch, and then a truck drives away. She stands up and walks toward the plale, limping as the pain sets in again.

Jack is alone next to the engine, wiping his hands on a greasy rag. Beside him, a prayer candle has burned down to almost nothing, and metal parts are strewn over the concrete floor of the hangar. 

“Jack?” Patty asks. “Where the hell are Mac and the packages?” She spent the better part of an hour fighting and dodging her way through the city above ground to get here. Mac and the others in the tunnels should be here by now.

“They’re not with you?” Jack’s face goes white.

“Got...held up.” The knife gash on her arm burns, but she’ll get over it. She’s doing better than the three guys who thought they could take her. “They were taking a tunnel route. It was supposed to come out at this airfield, an old La Ola smuggling route.”Jack’s face tightens with some unreadable emotion, and Patty can’t tell whether it’s fear for Mac or something else entirely. “The entrance could be anywhere…”

“It’s behind the hangar,” Jack says, his voice clipped and cold. She’ll ask how he knows that later. He picks up the candle and leads the way to a pile of trash carefully arranged behind one corner of the building. 

Patty rolls a few barrels aside to expose a rotting wooden door crossed with heavy chains and a lock. “They were supposed to come out of the tunnels right here.” 

“Let’s go.” Jack smashes the apparently police-issue lock off the chain, stepping down into the darkness, candle still flickering.

Patty follows. She can smell the acrid odor of spent explosives, and the air is choked with heavy dust clouds. And then she hears it, a faint coughing and the crunch of feet. Jack draws his gun and switches on the tac light, and out of the dust two figures emerge, both coated in dirt. Patty glances at them, trying to decide if one is Mac. But no, they both have the blue taser vests just faintly visible below the layers of grime. 

Jack grabs the shorter man, now clearly visible as James, and shoves him to his knees in the tunnel. He looks ready to pistol whip him. 

“Jack,” Patty intervenes. “Mac could be behind them. And if not, he can’t tell us anything if you break his jaw.”

“Angus won’t be coming,” James says hoarsely, then coughs again. “He decided to be a hero. I wonder if his plan worked, or if those sicarios have him now.” 

“One more word that isn’t about where Mac is, and I turn you both into memories,” Jack says coldly. “Where. Is. He.”

“He blew up the tunnel to stop the sicarios,” James says, shrugging. “I called out to see if he was still alive, but if he was he was unconscious. Would have been deadweight.” 

“So you left him behind for those monsters to find?” Jack yells. And then he does crack James over the head with the gun. Then Gomez. 

Patty doesn’t argue with him. They don’t have the ability to stand guard over these guys and go find Mac. She aims a subtle kick at James’s ribs as she passes. _ He deserves it. _

Jack stumbles ahead, coughing through the smoke and dust and calling Mac’s name. There’s some confused Spanish mumbling coming from somewhere too, and the sound of something heavy being moved. 

She hears a few gunshots ring out, and then Jack’s soft, broken cry of “Mac, oh god, no.” Her heart leaps into her throat, and she stumbles after him, leaning against the wall to support herself.

Jack is crumpled on his knees in the tunnel, beside a pile of dirt and rocks. And then part of the pile moves, just a little. _ Mac is buried under there. _ Jack is clawing away at the rubble with frenzied haste.

There’s a faint choked whimper, and he stops. Patty feels like she stops breathing. 

“Mac?” Jack whispers.

“J-jack?” Mac’s voice is choked with dust, pain, and disbelief. “You came back.”

“Of course I came back, kiddo. I wasn’t gonna leave you down here for those men to find.” Jack’s hands skim gently over Mac’s body. “Hey kiddo, I need to know, does it hurt anywhere?”

“Chest,” Mac groans. “And the beam fell on my legs. But I think...rest is just dirt.” He coughs, but it trails off into a keening whine of pain. 

“Okay, cause I don’t wanna find out something hurt your back and it be too late.”

“Just get me out of here. Please.” There’s raw desperation in Mac’s voice. “I don’t like being trapped down here.” Patty mentally adds possible concussion to the list, Mac doesn’t often display emotion like this. Then again, that’s the old Mac, and the one they got back from Murdoc is someone different. Besides, at the moment, he might be thinking he’s alone with Jack.

“I know, bud. I’m gonna get you out.” Patty kneels beside Jack, tossing stones aside and clawing through the dirt with her fingernails. Mac is breathing shakily, but he’s breathing. She checks carefully as they uncover more of his body, making sure there are no internal injuries Mac is downplaying, but it looks like he was in fact telling the truth. And was very fortunate. Even the beam that fell didn’t break his legs, only bruised them. Jack moves it aside enough for Mac to squirm out, but it doesn’t look like he’s going to be getting on his feet any time soon. Even bruised bones hurt like hell. After a single attempt, Mac crumples back to the floor, a soft sob of pain catching in his throat. 

She watches Jack pick up the coughing, filthy kid and hold him against his chest. “Hey, hey, Mac, it’s okay. We’re gonna go home now. We’re going home.”

It takes more time than she likes to settle Mac and the unconscious Gomez and James inside the plane. And Jack is fretting about the load they’re carrying. He’s considering flying to their exfil location rather than trying to make it all the way back. But finally, he sighs and shakes his head. “Don’t even know if they’ll still be there. But the kid needs a hospital now.” He frowns. “This thing’s old, compass ain’t even working right, but I got the stars.” Patty nods. “I’m gonna get us to the border in Texas so we can get him to a trauma center as fast as we can.”

She trusts Jack to get them there safely. He didn’t call his long-ago cover flight service ‘Fly By Night’ for nothing. Jack is actually an expert celestial navigator. 

“How is he?” Jack asks once he’s left the ground behind him and pointed the plane’s nose north. 

Patty leans over to where Mac is laid out as carefully as she could manage on a blanket on an old bench seat. “Some broken ribs and I think he cracked his shoulder blade and collarbone. But that could have happened when we went off the roof.”

“Off...what the _ hell _ Patty?” She doesn’t take it personally. He’s scared for Mac’s safety.

“It’s a long story.” She reaches back and smoothes Mac’s filthy hair out of his face, listening to his ragged, pained breaths. “But he’s strong. He’ll be okay Jack.”

And if she hears Jack whisper a wish to the stars overhead, she’s kind enough not to mention it. 

* * *

Bozer grins as he hands Matty the flashdrive. “Mission Accomplished.” 

Riley nods. “That drive is an exact duplicate of Kettner's secret laptop, which was jam-packed with stolen files. Not to mention digital artifacts proving he sent those files to a handler in the Chinese military.

Matty smiles. “More than enough to put Kettner away for treason, and well worth the dump truck of candy I apparently owe your second cousin Calvin, Bozer.” She shakes her head, but the look in her eyes is fond and caring. “So really good work, guys. Congratulations. You may now get divorced.”

Leanna shakes her head. “We actually have to get a divorce?”

“Well, technically not, you aren’t legally married right now,” Riley says. “Although, I have my ways…”

“Please, Riley, do not _ ever _hack the government databases to interfere in my love life,” Bozer says. 

“Okay…” Riley says, as if it’s a hardship. Then her phone buzzes. “Guys, Mac’s medical transport just got in. Jack’s with him and headed down to medical right now.” Bozer nods. He heard from Jack last night, while they were at the hospital getting Mac checked out. Fortunately Jack led with the good news. Mac had no internal injuries, just some cracked and broken bones. But still, it’s worrying that he trapped himself in a cave in, even if he insists he was trying to get out. 

“So, was living with me so bad?” Bozer asks as he steps out into the hall with Leanna.

“Well, you’re an incurably messy cook, you make movie references for literally any life event, and you snore.” Leanna smirks. “It was great.” 

“So…” Bozer hardly dares to hope for what he really wants to hear next.

“I think this was Riley’s way of trying to show me what I was missing.” Leanna smiles. “And I think maybe it’s time I started listening to her.” 

“You...want to...”

“Grab my stuff from the house and take it to your place,” Leanna says with a smile. “After we go see Mac and scold him again for being and idiot and getting hurt on another mission.”

“Is this...normal?” Leanna asks, shaking her head. 

“You have no idea.” He smiles. “I think it’s a surprise when Mac doesn’t go straight to the infirmary after a mission.”

* * *

PHOENIX MEDICAL

Patty sighs. It’s not the first time she’s been confined to a bed here and it probably won’t be the last, not if she keeps going on field ops. But the re-sewn gash on her side doesn’t hurt nearly as much as what she can hear from the bed in the half-curtained-off space beside her. 

Mac cries out, a gasping, choked sound that must be agony on his broken ribs. “No, stop, please!” She doesn’t want to imagine what he’s dreaming about. _ It could be any of the horrible things that happened over the past few days, or it could be even further in his past. _ His nightmares have been bad, and even with Jack sitting beside him Mac can’t always snap out of the terrible places in his head. 

She looks up. Jack is slumped in the chair, face drawn with worry and pain, and Mac is blinking blearily. He must have woken himself up. 

“Where…”

“Phoenix medical now, bud.” Jack smiles sadly. “Home sweet home, as far as you’re concerned.” Mac sighs.

“Thank you,” he whispers softly. “For coming back for me.” 

“Always, kiddo,” Jack says gently, and Patty nods as well. 

“I woke up for a little while. I heard voices, people speaking Spanish.” Mac looks away, and she almost can’t catch his next words. “I thought they were going to find me and take me with them.” She shivers, she knows what would have happened to him then. 

Patty rolls over and gives Mac a weak smile. “Listen, you didn’t have to get yourself almost killed to make me feel better about screwing up on a mission.” 

Mac smiles back, through the bruises and scrapes scattered across his face. She can see where they’ve cut away the scorched chunks of his hair, there’s still some blackening on the edges of the roughly chopped sections. “Didn’t want you to be lonely in here.”

“We got James and Gomez. They were just coming out of the tunnel entrance when Jack and I showed up.” She’s a little surprised. _ James could have disappeared. So could Gomez. _ But it looks like James’s game isn’t over yet. She really hopes Cage can get inside his head soon. _ She’s cracked targets just like him. _ She just hopes it’s in time. 

“James wants something,” Mac says. “But it isn’t me.” There’s a bitter disappointment in his voice. “He left me to die.”

Patty sighs. She’s known that for certain ever since she saw those men crawl out of that tunnel. James isn’t looking for a partner anymore. “Whatever he wants from us, I think Gomez and La Ola are part of it. He didn’t give us that name for nothing.” 

Mac nods. “I want to keep talking to him.”

“Are you sure?” Patty doesn’t want to let James _ see _ Mac again.

“If he knows we’re onto him, he’ll change his plans. We need to pretend we don’t know what he’s doing. And then maybe, we stand a chance of beating him.” Mac’s eyes are bright and confident, and she’s oddly reminded of a child who’s fallen off a bike, but is prepared to get back on. 

He shivers slightly, and she reaches over to help Jack pull the blankets up over his chest, tucking them in around the flimsy hospital gown that’s slid down over one shoulder. She can see the awful purple and black bruising around his shoulder and collarbone. He was hurt trying to save her. And she knows the scars this left will be her scars too. It breaks her heart to know that she’s the one who put Mac in this kind of danger. 

She gasps and groans when she stretches her arm too far and pulls her injury, and Jack shakes his head at her. “Patty, I got this. Stay put. You’re as bad as Mac.” 

She rolls back and stares up at the ceiling with a sigh, listening to the soft sounds of medical equipment around them. “I’m getting too old for this, Jack.”

“Nonsense, Patty. You’re just hitting your prime.” Jack grins. “But if either of you scare me like that again, you won’t have to worry about getting grey hairs. God knows you’ve given me enough.”

“Nice to know you care, Jack.”


	6. Bravo Lead+Loyalty+Family

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> SEE, I promised y'all I wouldn't skip the Deltas episode! Since I repurposed most of the original 3.06 to create MY 3.01, it seemed like the logical place to insert this episode, and I've been waiting excitedly to get to this one...

### 306-Bravo Lead+Loyalty+Friendship

2004

BOGOTA, COLUMBIA

_ Jack glances across the crowded street, absentmindedly purchasing a map from a street vendor, while glancing up at a nearby rooftop. He can only see the barest hint of movement, but it’s enough to tell him his sniper cover is in position. “Okay, guys, I'm almost in. Yeah, we just found them.” The man he’s been trailing for three blocks has just walked into an abandoned warehouse up the block. That has to be the location of the hostages. _

_ Worthy’s voice crackles through the comms. “Roger, Jack. Bravo 2, this is Bravo Lead. Confirm assault team in position.” _

_ More voices filter through. “Roger, Bravo Lead. Bravo Team in position.” _

_ “All right, gents, let's party.” Jack says, pushing his way through the crowd on the street, ducking under hanging displays of baskets and chili peppers. “And remember, flashes only, please, no frags. I don't want my bits and pieces becoming, you know, bits and pieces.” He’s the only one here not in full tac gear, and it sort of feels like he’s walking in naked. He won’t have any protection when the shooting starts, and he knows it will. _

_ Deacon chuckles on comms. “As soon as you confirm the hostage location, we'll join the party. Worthy, you just keep watching our backs.” _

_ Jack walks up to the door his target disappeared into a knocks, loudly. Someone wrenches it open a crack, and glares at him. Jack slips his foot in the door to keep the guy from slamming it again. He holds up his map like he’s going to ask for directions. “ _ Hola. Mi nombre es Jack _ …” He’s cut off by the guy inside grabbing his arm and yanking him into the building. _Okay, so far, so good. Now I just have to not die long enough to give my team the go sign. 

_ He groans as the guy yanking him around slams his back into a post. He’s still not totally recovered from the bullet he took to that shoulder. _ Damn it, that hurt. 

_ “Who the hell are you?!” The man shouts. _

_ Jack glances over his shoulder to see the row of hostages in the center of the building. “My close friends call me six in the center, up against the post. It's a family name.” He grins, and then ducks as explosions ring out and half the wall crumbles. _ Nice work, Fitzy. _ The next second, two flashbangs go off, and the room fills with a disorienting combination of light, sound, and smoke. _

_ Jack shoves his captor away, grabbing the man’s gun as he does so and taking the guy down with one shot. He joins his team, who are starting to cut the hostages free. _

_ “Okay, boys, grab the hostages. Let's get out of here,” Lanier shouts. It looks like they’re accounted for everyone else in the building, and the threat is neutralized. Jack breathes a small sigh of relief, shaking out his bad shoulder with a grimace. _

_ And then Worthy rushes into the room, eyes wide with panic. “Bad news, bad news! Hey, hey. These guys got friends. A lot of friends.” _

_ Jack can already hear the gunfire, and he watches the door behind Worthy peppered with sudden new holes. Everyone ducks, ushering the screaming hostages out the door and toward the trucks. _

_ Jack flinches when the street becomes a war zone. Gunfire rakes them from all sides, and he fires until his gun is empty, hoping to just give them enough cover to get in the trucks. _

_ Thorpe goes down with a muffled cry, and Deacon and Lanier run to grab him. Even from where he’s climbing into the truck, Jack can hear the man’s gasps of pain. _

_ “Come on, come on! “ Jack shouts, reaching down to help lift his teammate into the truck. “Thorpe, where you hit? _

_ “My back.” _

_ “Let's go!” Deacon yells, hauling himself up into the back of the vehicle. _

_ Jack helps settle Thorpe the best he can onto one of the seats, cringing at the amount of blood coating his hands. “I can't feel my legs,” Thorpe whispers, and the sound is agonizingly loud in Jack’s head. _ Please, please, don’t let us lose another man. _ It’s pretty messed up when he has to hope this is paralysis and not the oncoming shock to the nervous system that is going to take another friend away for good. “I can't feel my legs,” Thorpe repeats, quieter, head lolling. _

_ And then there’s a small thump, and Jack turns just in time to see Worthy diving to the floor, and watches in shock as the man flings something out the back of the truck, yelling “Fire in the hole!” _

_ The ground behind them explodes in a spray of dirt, and Jack cringes back. _We almost just all bought it. 

_ “South of the border,” Worthy whispers shakily, starting to get up, his face as stunned as if the grenade went off in it. _

_ “Still not in hell,” The team echoes. _

_ Jack sits down next to Worthy. The guy’s shaking like a leaf, hands trembling. _

_ “Worthy. You're an animal,” Jack says with a small chuckle, putting a hand on his teammate’s shoulder. _

_ “Just get me home, Jack,” Worthy whispers. _

_ “You just got us all home, brother. You just got us all home.” _

* * *

MAC’S HOUSE

THIS GARAGE IS PRETTY NICE

Jack leans over, glancing down at the spark plugs on the engine of the GTO. “Hey Mac, gimme some more light here. I think it’s the gapping on these babies.” 

Mac obliges, holding up a shop lamp. He’s insisting he’s okay to go back to work, that his collarbone and shoulder are fine, so Jack’s trying to keep him distracted with any possible interesting projects they can do around the house, so he’ll at least complete his last week of injury leave. Tearing apart Jack’s beloved GTO is worth it if it keeps Mac from going back to the field on a barely healed body. 

“Are you sure that’s what’s causing the knocking?” Mac asks. 

“No. But dude, that’s the fun of working on your own car. You don’t have to figure it out right away. You can tinker and fine-tune and take your time. This ain’t your mechanic shop.” Jack chuckles, reaching one greasy hand behind him. “Hand me another wrench.” 

Mickey starts barking and leaps to his feet, staring at the open garage door. There’s a strange sound of wheels on the cement, and Jack looks up, half afraid his car’s started moving on its own. But it’s not the GTO. It’s a wheelchair, with a very familiar occupant. 

“South of the border,” Ryan Thorpe says with a wry smile. 

“I'm still not in hell.” Jack chuckles. “Ryan, I swear, we were gonna come take you up on that rain check for riding…”

“Well, it’ll have to take another rain check. Caleb Worthy’s in trouble.” 

“Aw, hell.” Jack’s seen less of Worthy than any of the rest of the guys. He’s been busy with his kid the last few years, his son was born with severe heart and spinal defects that have taken years to correct. Jack can see why Worthy hasn’t wanted to miss a minute with his family. Their last few get-togethers, he had to bow out since his kid was in the hospital. But lately, the few pictures Jack has seen on Facebook look promising. “What happened?”

“You gotta see this.” Thorpe pulls out his phone and opens a video. 

Worthy’s familiar face flashes up on the screen, the picture grainy but still perfectly recognizable. “My picture's everywhere. I had to flee the city into the hills. I'm sending my coordinates with this video. If any of you guys are listening, Jungle Book.”

Jack flinches. That’s their old code for a teammate in trouble needing help immediately. 

“Worthy sent me that video a little over an hour ago. Sent it to all our old e-mails, the ones from Delta days. Soon as I saw it, I got in the car, came right to you.”

Jack nods. He doesn’t check that old email anymore, he barely remembers it exists. He’s glad Thorpe told him this was happening. “How in the hell did Worthy go get himself in this kind of trouble?” 

Ryan sighs. “I called his wife on the way, let her and the kid know things were bad but not hopeless. All they’re seein’ is the news coverage, and believe me, it all looks bad.” He runs a hand over his face. “Worthy was on a contracting job down in Honduras. Apparently, a group of insurgents had been bombing railroad depots, and the crew Worthy hooked up with was hired to protect the tracks. Only, Worthy was caught on video setting up an IED seconds before it went off.”

“No, t-that's got to be some kind of mistake. Worthy's no terrorist. The guy's a war hero.” Jack bites his lip and looks at Mac, who’s gone a whole new shade of pale under the grease smeared on his face. _ Any time we deal with false accusations of terrorism, it brings back all of his past. _And this time, not being able to prove Worthy is innocent probably won’t just mean prison time. 

“Yeah. Well, we know that, but the Honduran government does not. They've ordered him shot on sight.” _ That’s what I was afraid of. _

“Jungle Book, huh? Those are two words I never wanted to hear. That's a call to action, right there.”

“No kidding. If he's bringing up our old oath, that means he thinks he's not coming back home.” Thorpe’s voice is cracking. 

“Oh, he's coming home,” Jack says. “If I have to get him myself. But...So can't the State Department or the DoD help us out with this one?”

Ryan shakes his head, a small piece of straw flying out of his hair onto the floor. He must have come straight from the stables. “No. He wasn't working with the U.S. government on this one, so they're not gonna be any help at all. And now that he's been labeled a terrorist, the State Department won't touch him, Jack. Worthy's only hope of surviving this is you.”

“We’re gonna go get him,” Mac says, practically slamming his hand down on the workbench beside the car.

“Whoa, kid, hold your horses there. We’re not going alone,” Jack says. “Jungle Book protocol means he sent this to the whole team. I gotta make some calls, tell them we’re picking them all up. Okay?”

Mac nods. “I’ll pack a bag, then.” 

“Good idea. Ryan, you wanna run point from here?” The man nods. “I’ll get you what you need, make yourself at home in here, alright?” He opens the door and helps Ryan get his chair up the step into the house.

Jack follows Mac into the kitchen. The kid’s grabbing some random stuff from under the sink and in the cupboards; his idea of packing is strange, but Jack won’t question it. “Mac, are you sure you wanna come?”

“Your friend is in trouble. He’s...he’s more than your friend anyway, he’s family. And if you taught me anything, it’s that family is everything.”

“And here I didn’t think you were listening to my fatherly advice.” Jack grins.

“If he’s your family, now he’s my family too,” Mac says. “And I’m not letting you go down there alone.” Jack nods. _ At least with Mac, we have someone who won’t even start to question Worthy’s good name. _

“Can we ask Matty for help?” Mac asks, stuffing what looks suspiciously like half a bomb into his backpack. 

Jack shakes his head. “I know Matty’ll loan me the jet on the Phoenix jet on the down-low, but she can’t get officially involved. Which means Ryan’s gonna be our War Room, with my computer that Riley may or may not have illegally cloned her entire satellite surveillance tech onto.”

Mac looks up. “Riley rigged your computer to do that?” He sets his bag down on the counter, and Jack can see that his shoe is tapping steadily against the floor. He’s stressed out again, trying to keep himself calm and plan for things rather than just freak out. Jack spies an unused paperclip on the counter and pushes it Mac’s way. 

“We were lookin’ for you, kiddo. It was all hands on deck, legal means or not. And then I just...didn’t un-download it.” He shrugs. “You of all people know how touch and go a situation like Worthy's in is gonna be. How much the government is gonna want to wash their hands of the whole thing.”

Mac nods. “Which is why we need to go get him.” His hands are shaking a little, but he holds up a paperclip folded into the Deltas insignia. “Because if we don’t help him, no one will.” 

* * *

THE WAR ROOM

Riley perches on the edge of the War Room coffee table, running a scan on her rig while periodically checking her watch. Bozer walks into the room with Leanna, frowning. Both of them look a little tired, but Riley chooses not to comment on that fact. Apparently they’ve been marathoning Bozer’s must-see movie list since they officially moved in together.

Bozer glances at the conspicuous lack of their leader. “Not sure what's more unsettling, us being late to a meeting Matty called, or Matty being late to a meeting Matty called.”

A video suddenly flashes up on the War Room screen. Bozer jumps at the sight of Matty’s face, larger than life and a little annoyed. “I'm not late, Bozer. I've been waiting for you guys.”

“Matty, what are you doing in D.C.?” Leanna says. 

“Does this have to do with finding Murdoc?” Riley asks. She ran the hidden camera from Mac’s place three times, and she’s still got nothing useful from it. _ He’s still out there, and he’s taunting Mac, and we’re helpless against him. _ And the sight of all the pictures Murdoc must have acquired before Mac and Jack found the camera makes her feel sick. _ I wonder what he does with them? I probably don’t want to know. _

“I wish. Had a meeting on the Hill.” 

"The in-person kind, apparently."

"That's correct, Riley. And before you start digging for more info, that's all I can say. So swallow your questions, Bozer, and let me explain why you're here. Mac and Jack are leaving the country for a while, and Cage is with Gomez right now, hopefully he’ll prove easier to crack than James. So I’m calling in the Teen Titans again for another solo op.” 

“Oooh, I like that name,” Leanna says. “We’re totally rolling with it.” 

“I call Raven.” Riley says, grinning. 

“Starfire.” Leanna grins, and then both of them glance at Bozer, who looks both confused an a little concerned. “And Bozer should be…”

“Beast Boy!” Riley and Leanna say in perfect synchronization. 

“Okay, you two got this psychic connection thing going. It's really creepy, and I don't watch Teen Titans 'cause I don't watch cartoons.”

“Really?” Riley asks.

“Wait, is being Beast Boy bad?” Bozer asks quickly.

Matty shakes her head. “Not bad, Bozer, just annoying. Which is actually perfect, because right now, you're really annoying me. So if you don't mind, I'd like to get this briefing started.”

“I don't, if, uh, Maven and Firestarter don't mind.”

“Raven and Starfire,” Leanna says. She turns to Riley. “I am so making him marathon Teen Titans with me. It’ll be payback for all the terrible b-movies he’s subjected me to for the past few weeks.” 

“Oh, whatever. Matty, you were saying?” 

A couple pictures of a man with greying hair and a frown flash up on screen. 

“Meet Terry Penn. Known in the underworld as a ‘connector’.”

“Which is?” Bozer asks. Let's say you're a terrorist from the East Turkestan Liberation Organization in China and you want to reach out to the Italian Mafia to hide one of your guys in Paterson, New Jersey. How would you do that? You'd contact Penn.”

Riley nods, she’s ferreted out a few of these people before. Most of them aren’t hard marks, they’re people who profit off staying out of the direct line of fire. But some like to do their own dirty work. And she doesn’t know which kind Penn is. 

“So he's like a scumbag Linkedln?” Leanna asks 

“Exactly,” Matty says. “Phoenix just intercepted chatter that Penn is gonna be in L.A. later today for a meeting. But something must have spooked him, because he just cashed out a bunch of offshore accounts, and chartered a plane to get him out of the country just three hours after he arrives. My guess is he's about to go off the grid for good.” Riley nods. That’s an escape plan if she ever saw one. 

“Which leads me to your assignment: with all the people that Penn knows, his cell phone is a veritable who's who of the underworld. Huge get for law enforcement.”

“And you want to be the one doing the getting,” Leanna says. 

“Exactly. Cage is getting nowhere with James, and maybe if we have some names to put on the table, he’ll let something more slip. At the very least, it’s quite the black book to get our hands on.” 

“So what's the play?” Bozer asks. “We put Riley in position and she hacks it?” 

“I hope that isn't your plan, Matty. His phone's got no USB or headphone jack. It runs a proprietary O.S., it's got end-to-end encryption built into all apps. It'd be almost impossible to get behind, even for me.” Honestly, she’s kind of jealous this level of tech is in the hands of the other side. _ I’d like to have something like that for our own people. _

“Which is why you're not gonna hack it. You're gonna steal it.” 

“Nice. A little grand theft cell phone. So where's this heist going down? In his fancy hotel room? Or are we hitting him in transit?” Bozer asks. He sounds all too excited for this, and Leanna is rolling her eyes; she’s probably suffered through almost every heist movie ever created with Bozer’s running commentary. Bozer apparently went through a phase before Riley knew him. Thanks to Mac, she knows all about several of his failed film projects. 

“Neither, Beast Boy. You guys are gonna intercept Penn here.”

“Whoa, that's the Sparkman house,” Riley says. 

“The who-man house?” Bozer asks. 

“The Sparkman house. Sparkman's this crooked Internet mogul who made a fortune mining Bitcoin. His place in the Hollywood Hills is _ the _ place for the hottest parties.” Riley’s been there twice before. She doesn’t want to think about those ops. Mostly because her partner was Nick. She hasn’t seen or heard from her ex in over a year now, but she hates when memories of him intrude on her life. She wishes she could wipe him out of her head completely. 

“Hot parties that a lot of shady people attend. Riley, Leanna, you're to go to the party as guests, get close to Penn, shadow him and then look for an opportunity to steal his phone.”

“And what am I doing?” Bozer asks. 

“You're gonna outfit Riley and Leanna for the op, and then you're gonna help run the war room. And remember: this might be one of the hottest parties in town, but it's also one of the most dangerous. With Penn in attendance, that means a lot of very violent men and women will be there as well. So be ready.”

“Okay, let’s do this thing.” Leanna grins. “Raven, you ready to party?”

“Sure am, Starfire.” 

“Okay...by that logic is Jack going to be Robin?” Leanna asks as they walk out the doors. 

Riley shakes her head. She’s been thinking this one over already. “Nah. Jack’s Cyborg. Just to piss him off about the rise of the machines,” Riley chuckles. “Mac is Robin. And Sam’s Catwoman.”

“How come she gets to be Catwoman?” Bozer asks, sounding a bit put out. 

“We ran out of Teen Titans. And she’s mysterious and possibly deadly.” Riley shrugs. 

“Are you sure Mac and Jack aren’t the Dynamic Duo? Batman and Robin?” Leanna asks. 

“Don’t tell Jack he’s Batman. Ever. He’ll try to get Mac to make him all those fancy gadgets.” Riley’s seen more than one instance of Jack trying to get Mac to bring fictional technology to the real world. He claims they had a working lightsaber at one point. Mac refuses to build another one. 

“Do I have to be Beast Boy?” Bozer continues to complain.

Riley and Leanna turn back to him. “Yes,” both of them answer at the same time. Bozer groans. 

* * *

Jack leans back against the seat. “Hang in there, Worthy,” he whispers. 

He wishes he could make the jet go faster, but he knows they’re already flying as fast as possible. He stares out the window, thinking about Bogota and life debts and regrets. Things he should have said that maybe now he’ll never get the chance to. _ Don’t think like that. We’re gonna get Worthy home just fine. And then you can sit around and laugh about old times. He’s gonna be fine. _

Jack is grateful when the computer chimes and pulls him out of his thoughts. He opens it, and Riley’s face appears in the video chat. “Okay, so, did y'all find anything out about Worthy?” Jack asks.

“We did. We have the originals of the security footage of Worthy near a Honduran train station right before the bombs exploded. The video quality's not great, but unfortunately, what's on it's even worse.”

A video pops up and begins to play. The picture isn’t clear, at all, but Jack can see someone, a dark shape in tac gear, moving something on the tracks and then running away. Seconds later there’s a massive explosion. Riley runs the video back and freezes it when the camera catches the man’s face for a moment. It’s grainy, but that’s Worthy. 

Jack shakes his head. “No. No way. Worthy would not do something like that, trust me. He was probably trying to disarm the damn thing.” There’s an eerie familiarity to this. It’s some kind of CCTV, not a Google Street car capture, but the situation is all too similar. _ Wrong place, wrong time, trying to help and getting accused for his trouble. _ Jack can tell Mac must be having similar thoughts, the kid’s eyes are glassy and it looks like he’s reliving some of his worse memories. 

“Yeah, but there's no way you can tell that from the footage, Jack, the picture quality's garbage,” Riley says, snapping both of them out of their thoughts. 

“Can't tell anything from that footage,” Mac says roughly, turning away. He sounds equal parts angry and hurt. 

“And while we're playing "Stump Jack," any idea what he was doing with this guy?” Riley asks, and Jack frowns at the pictures on the screen. 

“That's Jacob Lawlor.”

“Yeah. He's well decorated. Now he's a freelance contractor. Does a lot of work in the area,” Riley says. “There’s some stories floating around about him, and it’s not pretty.”

Jack nods. _ Guys like him don’t leave wars behind. _They’re often unnecessarily brutal in their jobs. But that doesn’t mean Worthy was the same. And it doesn’t mean they could ever make a guy Jack’s known for years break his moral code. 

“Worthy was hired on Lawlor's crew to protect the tracks, not blow 'em up.” This doesn’t make sense to Jack. None of it does. 

“Guys, I got to go. I'll try and clean up this footage. Maybe it'll give us some answers,” Riley says. 

“Okay.” The call ends, and Jack glances at Mac, who’s twisting another paperclip violently. “How you holding up, kid?”

“Um, okay.” Mac shrugs. “It’s just a lot of bad memories, you know?”

“Trust me, I know.” Jack’s been having mini flashbacks since he saw that video Worthy sent. If he lets himself drift, the smell of smoke and gunpowder and the sound of bullets and screams will drag him under. “You gonna make it?”

“Yeah.” Mac sets down another paperclip shaped like the Delta symbol. “You really think you're gonna be able to reassemble your old Delta unit? Aren't those guys retired for a long time now?”

“Trust me, dude, they're in. Even if they didn’t see the video, they’ll know what’s up when I show up on their doorstep. Guys like that, they’re never gonna let one of their own down.” He sighs and leans back in his chair. 

Mac takes a deep breath, looking up from the computer screen he’s been playing with for the past couple minutes. “Jack, you’re probably not gonna like to hear this, but I don’t think Worthy was trying to disarm that bomb. I think he did blow it up.”

“What the hell? Mac?” Mac is the _ last _ person Jack would expect to see argue Worthy’s guilt. 

Mac rolls his eyes in exasperation. “I said listen, Jack. Pena taught me that sometimes, the safest way to try and dispose of a bomb was to blow it, if there were no possible casualties. Disarming something you don’t recognize can get you killed, and Worthy was a sniper, not an explosives guy, right?”

Jack nods.   
“I was reading through the reports on the depot bombings. Every one of them mentions that the bombs went off when the train wheels contacted them on the tracks. Engines have been blown up completely, caught on fire, you name it. Seventeen people have been killed and dozens more injured. Worthy set that bomb off so the train wouldn’t hit it. There could have been a lot of people waiting for it at that depot the footage came from who would have been hurt if he’d left it.”

Jack nods. _ Sometimes out EOD guys would do that too, evacuate an area and blow a device they found, just to be sure it wasn’t a threat anymore. _ If he’d been thinking straight, he might have figured that out himself, or at least realized what Mac was onto. But his mind’s all messed up and halfway stuck in the past. _ Good thing Mac’s here to keep me grounded. _“But what the hell was he doing on his own working explosives?” Jack asks. “He should have had someone from the crew who was trained. These guys don’t normally work alone.”

“Maybe something happened to his partner?” Mac asks. “Guess we’ll find out when we get there.”

“Yeah, guess we will.”

* * *

Bozer finishes zipping up the back of Leanna’s dress, and hooks the clasp into place. “All right...Okay, how's it feel? Can you move in it?”

Leanna tests her range of motion carefully, clearly trying not to accidentally pop a seam, and he can tell when her face goes from concentration to surprise.“ Yeah, it fits great. It's comfortable, too.”

“Good. I lined it with ballistic mesh fabric, then adjusted the cut for maximum maneuverability.” 

“Mm. Sexy and functional.” Leanna smiles. 

Bozer studies the lines of the dress. It’s fitted, but in a way that means there isn’t extra cloth to catch on something or tangle around Leanna’s legs. Riley’s dress is a little longer and looser, so she can hide her knife on her thigh. She needs her small handbag free to hold the fake phone she’s going to swap for Penn’s real one. Leanna, on the other hand, can use hers for other purposes. Bozer holds up the small purse. 

“And I got more. A little something from my nine millimeter spring bag collection.” The gun inside raises with a soft click and whirr.

“Oh, yeah, that's my type of clutch,” Leanna chuckles. “Great job, babe. Can I bring this one home?”

“Well, see, technically this is Phoenix property...but also technically, I could totally replicate it. With Mac’s help. He designed the internal mechanism. A really long time ago, when we were making a spy movie in high school. His gadgets were probably the only good thing in it,” Bozer says. He hasn’t been able to bring himself to rewatch the movies that had Jerry in them yet, at least not with Leanna. _ But someday. _

“Hey, how's the phone coming, Riley?” he asks, glancing over to where she’s sitting at a desk soldering and connecting wires. 

“Slowly. A convincing fake takes time. When I'm done, all we'll have to worry about is getting it close enough to swap it out.”

Bozer grins and puffs out his chest slightly. “With Raven and Starfire in the field and Batman running the war room, what could go wrong?”

“Wait, are you are you saying you're Batman?” Leanna asks. 

“I mean, come on. I'm way more Batman than Beast Boy.” He tries to strike his most heroic pose, but only manages to collide with a stack of papers on the edge of Riley’s desk. Both she and Leanna glare at him. 

“So are you changing your character name, Bozer?” Leanna asks. 

“Such a Beast Boy move,” Riley adds. 

“Leanna, you know how psyched I was when Matty hired you? Hella psyched. But now that you two have started ganging up on me, I'm revising my opinion.”

“Such a Beast Boy response,” Riley mumbles, still looking down at her work.

“What? Huh?”

“Pretty much.” Leanna chuckles. “But we love you anyway, Bozer.” 

* * *

Mac looks up at the small suburban house, that looks like the furthest thing from a Delta operator’s home he can imagine. Jack pulls the car over behind an SUV with a bike rack and the cliche family stickers on the rear window, except that the family stick people look like aliens. 

“Deacon lives the closest, so we're, uh, we're picking him up first."

“He lives here?”

“He’s the real deal, man. Toughest SOB to ever wear the patch, and the best damn parent I ever met.” Jack smiles. “He got it all, man. He really did.” His smile fades a little. “His wife passed a couple years ago, so he’s raisin’ the kids himself. But he never says a bad thing about ‘em.” 

Mac walks up on the porch beside Jack and listens to the sounds coming from inside the house. “Julie, please put that water pistol down. I have asked you and asked you. Now, come on, help me out here. Joel, put your pants on, man. Let's go. Let's saddle up. We got to go. Come on, come on. Tie the shoe. We got to go, please. Help me out here.” 

It’s firm but gentle, and Mac’s throat tightens. _ James was never like that with me. Not even when Mom was alive. _ Some part of him used to excuse the harshness by saying James was overworked, that as a single parent he couldn’t keep up with his job and Mac’s antics. _ But that was his justification. He didn’t have to be that way. _ James could have been kinder, more understanding, less violent. And the man that answers Jack’s knock at the door is living proof that a father could do better. 

“Deacon,” Jack says, with a smile. 

“Yes? Dalton?” And then the door bursts open and two kids race out, both holding water pistols, mounting a concerted assault on the invaders. 

Mac raises his hands to protect himself, but he can’t help grinning, even as a spray of water hits him right in the cheek. 

Deacon shakes his head, reaching to corral his children. “Hey, hey, not in the face. Not in...Julie, you are killing me today.” He succeeds in removing her gun with a move Mac’s seen Jack use on assailants before, but his son seems to realize that disarmament is imminent, because he dodges behind the porch swing, hitting Jack in the chest with another shot. 

“Are you kidding me, Joel? Please, please stop that.” Finally, Deacon manages to wrestle the weapons away from the kids, and shoves them both toward a waiting car that’s pulled up in the driveway, with sack lunches in hand. “Behave in karate, okay?”

When the kids are safely on their way, Deacon turns back. “Sorry about that, guys.”

“Ah, no harm done. You’re training some tactical geniuses there,” Jack chuckles. “Deacon, this is Mac. He’s my kid. And we work together.” 

“Oh yeah? See, Dalton, I heard a rumor you're working for the government again. Any truth to that?”

“Yeah, I left that when I left the CIA. I, uh, work at a think tank now, it’s been a few years.” He knows none of the guys really believe that. They all know an agency cover story when they hear one. But he has to try, or Matty will be pissed if she finds out he let the cat out of the bag. 

“Oh, a think tank, huh? What are you, the tank part?” Deacon asks. 

“Pretty much, and he’s the thinkin’.” Jack rests a hand on Mac’s shoulder. “Your kids are growin’ up so fast, man.”

“Yeah, they kinda do that.” Deacon chuckles. “But God, I wouldn’t trade ‘em for the world.” 

Jack nods. “Hey, uh, you stayed in touch with Worthy lately?”

“Not as much as I should have, man. I shoulda talked him outta this thing, before it all went to hell on him.” Deacon sighs. 

Any idea why he'd take up this contracting work? 

“Yep. Money. You remember his kid had that surgery, a while back?”

“Yeah, I told him if he needed any extra cash…”

“We all did. And he said he was fine, insurance was gonna cover it. And it would have, if he hadn’t gotten laid off right before the kid was due to go in. Anyway, surgery went well, kid healed fine, but it took a major chunk out of his savings. He didn’t want us to know, but he finally told me when I saw him a few months ago.”

“So he took the job in Honduras?” 

“Yup. Said he was gonna refill his bank account. It'd be quick. And then he was gonna hang up his spurs for good, but it's not the way it went down.” 

That's why we're here, man. We're going to get him and you're coming with us.”

“Yes sir.” Deacon smiles. “Knew when I saw the video wouldn’t be long before one of you guys was at my door. Hope you have a better ride down than I do.”

“Oh, hell yeah, man.” Jack chuckles. “We’re going in style, trust me.” 

“Well, the kids are gonna enjoy spending the night with their cousins, and I’ve got a go bag packed already.” Deacon grins. “Let's go.”

Unfortunately, their next stop is less inviting. There are no water pistols, but there is one very determined wife, who seems less than pleased to see Jack. Mac would make a joke, but he doesn’t want to draw her ire on him. He’s content to disappear into a corner with Deacon, watching it all play out.

“So what’s the problem with her?” Mac asks.

“Uh, last time a lot of us got together…” Deacon shrugs. “Well, it’s Jack’s story to tell, not mine, but...don’t mention Jell-O, whatever you do.” 

Mac nods, it’s probably nothing like the Jell-O story _ Matty _ never wants to hear again from that time he and Jack got in trouble in Minnesota, and turns back to the conversation happening in the dining room. Jack sounds like he’s at the end of his rope. “So, you see, Judy, I thought it would really be fun to get the guys together for a little, uh…”

“Fishing trip,” Deacon says.

“Fishing trip. That's right. No big deal, just some typical male-bonding stuff.” 

Jack is saved from further subjection to an angry glare by Omar Munoz hurrying out of the hallway with a duffel bag slung over his shoulder. “Okay,” He says to Jack, then turns to his wife, kissing her forehead. “I'll be back soon, darling. Hunting trip will only be a few days.”

“Hunting? I thought it was fishing.” Judy’s eyes are full of skepticism. 

“It's both,” Jack says, sounding desperate to keep this whole thing from falling apart right here. “It's one of those package vacation deals.”

Once they’re out the door, Munoz shakes his head. “Judy still hates you.”

“Ah, she's about as warm as a stepmother's kiss,” Jack says. “You know, I thought after ten years she'd be over the whole Jell-O incident, man.”

“No.” Munoz chuckles.

“Well, if she hated that, she’d really hate what Mac can do with a box of Jell-O. Omar, this is my kid, Mac.” Mac notices that for the second time, no one seems at all surprised at the way Jack is introducing him. _ I wonder if they all already know what he is to me. _ He knows these guys have their own sort of group chat going. Maybe they already know more about Mac than he does about them. But it doesn’t feel weird. Just like a proud parent who’s bragged up his kid to his old buddies. 

“So next stop is our demo guy, Fitzy Sheng,” Jack says. 

“I wonder what Fitzy's been up to,” Munoz says. 

“Oh, I don't know, but whatever it is, I'm sure it involves really big explosions.”

“Really?” Mac asks. 

“Yeah. You're gonna get along just great.” 

An hour later Mac watches, suitably impressed, while a tiny toy train chugs along a set of tracks until it reaches a trestle bridge. The bridge, the moment the wheels hit it, explodes in a shower of sparks and a small but resonating boom. 

Fitzy Sheng turns around with a grin. “It took me over a week to build that bridge.” He shakes his head, then mimes an explosion. “Poof. Gone in two seconds. Life, huh?” 

“Choo-choo train philosophy fits you. I love it,” Jack says. “But now that we've seen that and before you and Mac get going talking physics and chemistry and all that crazy stuff, you in?”

Sheng sighs. “I promised Rachel that this was gonna be the biggest explosion I made once I was out. But if Worthy's in trouble, I know she'll understand. I'm in.” The next second he turns to Mac. “Jack says you do unconventional builds. What’s your favorite materials combination?”

Mac is content to talk shop with Fitzy until they land in Kansas City to pick up the last member of the team. 

Mac hasn’t been in a school counselor’s office in a very long time. He’s spent his share of time in the Phoenix psychology services, but his memories of the Mission City counselor’s office, where he spent plenty of time after the football field incident, are of chairs that smelled like mothballs and eucalyptus and a small woman with horn-rimmed glasses and a clipboard who sat and asked him questions about how he felt and about his mom. 

So when he walks through the frosted glass door and sees a guy who looks bigger and scarier than most of the people he met in prison wrapping Jack in a giant hug, he feels a little like running away. Fast.

But he doesn’t get the chance, because the man turns to him, with a smile that instantly wipes away the ferocious look that the rest of him shows. “And you have _ got _ to be Mac, right?” He shakes Mac’s hand so powerfully Mac can’t help but flinch a little. He immediately regrets it, seeing a look of concern cross the man’s face, and wants to disappear. _ He’s a school counselor. Probably deals with signs of abuse on a regular basis. _Lanier gives him a second warm smile, though, and Mac relaxes, just a little. “Jack’s always talking about you. Nice to meet you in the flesh.” 

He turns the the others. “I’m guessing you heard about Worthy, am I right?”

“Yeah. But not just on the news.” Deacon holds up his phone, handing it over to Lanier, who takes it and watches the whole video without saying a word. When he looks up, his eyes look like they’re shimmering with tears. 

“This is why we're here, Sid. We need your help bringing him home. You in, big boy?” Jack asks. 

Lanier nods. “I'm in. Worthy doesn’t deserve to have his name dragged through the mud like that, and he sure as hell doesn’t deserve to die like some hunted animal for something he didn’t do. Let's go.”

Mac feels more than a little awed as they walk through the hangar at the airfield. He feels like a child surrounded by these guys, heroes who’ve saved countless lives and become a brotherhood so strong no distance or time could break it. 

“This is amazing,” he whispers to Jack. “Every one of these guys put their life on pause immediately to go save Worthy.”

“Yeah, well, Worthy's the only reason these guys have a life _ to _ pause.” Jack smiles fondly. “We take care of our own.”

Mac nods. He knows that’s how Jack treats his teams, like his family. And these guys seem to have accepted him without question. But he still feels a bit like an outsider. Like he did when he first joined Riley and Jack. They had experiences, inside jokes, shared missions and memories. And he was the interloper. It’s starting to feel like that again.

He shakes off the thought. They have a job to do, and a man to save. That’s what matters. 

* * *

HONDURAS

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN

There was a time Deacon Hern could outrun, outfight, and outeat any man in the unit. He’s painfully aware that his days of two of those are behind him. Just the plane ride has left him stiff, sore, and ahy, even though the jet is the kind of plush only millionaires can afford. _ Old war wounds take a toll. _

All around him the rest of the guys are clearly feeling it too. Munoz sets down his duffel and straightens up with a wince. “Oh, my back.”

Fitzy nods in agreement. “My shoulders are killing me.” 

A man with thinning grey hair and sharp eyes walks up, and Deacon takes an instant dislike to him. He’s always considered himself a good judge of character, and something tells him this man isn’t worth his trust. He sees Munoz tense as well. The two of them were always the first to vet local contacts and informants, and if this guy is raising both their hackles, something isn’t right. 

_ Maybe it’s just that it looks like he and all his men are right here, not doing a thing to find Worthy themselves. _He shakes his head. Worthy went to work for this guy, it can’t be too bad. He hopes. 

Jack steps up to shake the man’s hand. “You must be Lawlor. Nice to meet you.” He motions to Mac, who’s been clinging to him like a burr since Deacon’s joined them. He can tell something’s a little off about the kid, probably something more than what looks a whole lot like autism or at least ADHD. Deacon’s read plenty on things like that, he always wanted to be ready for whatever his kids could present. And Mac’s shown some classic signs, especially his constant mild agitation and the way he drums his foot or twists paperclips._ Think they call that stimming, if I’m not mistaken. _

But there’s more to it than that. Before Deacon had kids, he had a team of men with horrors behind their eyes and demons haunting them. And he can see that inside the kid too. He looks barely old enough to drink, but somewhere in his life, he’s been through hell and back. 

Deacon pulls his thoughts back to the conversation happening in front of him. “I'm glad you called, Dalton,” Lawlor says. “Could use the extra manpower. Honduran police have upped their efforts to find Worthy.”

“Yeah, has he, uh, reached out to you guys?” Jack asks. 

“No.” And the bad feeling in the pit of Deacon’s stomach gets bigger. _ Worthy didn’t trust him either. What are we missing? _

“All right, come meet my fellas,” Jack says, gesturing to the team. He’s almost to them when Deacon hears an insistent buzzing. 

Jack pulls out his phone and answers it. “Hey Riles. Hey. You there? You’re breakin’ up, okay?” He shakes his head. “I swear, I hate cell service in foreign countries. Damn, didn’t bring a sat phone on this one either.” He tries for a few more minutes, walking around the area trying to get signal, but it’s no good, and he hangs up. 

“What was that all about?” Lawlor asks. 

“Ah, just home base checking in. Couldn’t get anything on the line though.” Jack shakes his head. 

Lawlor nods. “We're rolling out. Jack says you need a ride.”

“Yup. Let's get out of here.” Jack nods toward one of the canvas-back trucks. “All right, we're in this one. Line up, boys, let's go.”

They all climb in. It feels like no time has passed at all since Bogota, except that instead of Thorpe beside him, Deacon’s sitting next to one of Lawlor’s men. Jack, he notices, is sitting beside Mac, and he has one arm around the kid’s shoulders. 

Deacon’s been a family man for twelve years now. He knows the easy bond between a parent and a child, the way they start to learn each other’s mannerisms. And he knows Mac and Jack haven’t been partners very long, he never met the kid before today, but so _ many _ things Mac does have Jack Dalton written all over them. From a tilt of the head to a movement of a hand while talking, the kid’s every inch Jack’s son, even if there’s no blood between them. 

For a while, when Jack started talking about a kid, and not the ‘Riley’ he apparently adopted while he was with the CIA, Deacon wondered if he’d somehow reconnected with a son he never knew he had. But a few things Jack said quickly put that thought to rest. Still, there’s more family between them than Deacon’s seen with some of his kids’ classmates. 

_ Dalton was always cut out to be a family man. He was the glue that held this whole unit together. He called us a family so much that it started to feel true. He tied us all together, made what we are real. _Jack’s always made family wherever he goes. And Deacon’s glad to meet the new addition. 

He’s especially enjoying telling the kid the stories of the crazy things Jack’s done. _ He’s probably told Mac all about us, but there’s some stories I’m sure he neglected to share… _

He’s laughing by the time they get around to the one with the sheep. “I mean, I didn't know what to say. Dalton, crazy SOB, looks up, says to the shepherd, "How much for the whole herd?"” Everyone laughs. Aside from Mac. The kid’s barely even cracked a smile, not even at the Bolivia story. _ Tough crowd. _

Mac finally does say something, but it’s not at all what Deacon expected. “Jack, top five Bruce Willis movies?” 

Jack grins and settles back. “Excellent question. You know, I could break BW's catalogue into four main periods, really, I mean, you got your…” Lanier and Munoz groan. 

“Die Hard 2 is one of them, though, right?” Mac asks, with an insistence that tells Deacon this isn’t just a fun game to pass the time. He’s trying to get Jack a message. Without Lawlor’s guy sitting next to them realizing it. 

“It is great, but I don't know if it's top five…” Jack says. 

“But you remember the plot?”

“Mm-hmm. Who are you? I know the plot to every single Bruce Willis movie ever made. Who do you think you're talking to? And you should reemmber too, we only marathoned Die Hard a week ago…” 

“Specifically the part about the soldiers that Bruce meets?”

Mac leans toward Jack, and Deacon watches some invisible spark of understanding pass between them, a silent communication born of partnership under fire, but more than that, of family bonds. _ They say twins can read each other’s minds sometimes. Not sure how much of that I believe, my kids are anything but mind readers, but I think it’s true that family can tell when someone’s in trouble. _

Jack gives the kid a slow nod, then turns to the others in the vehicle. “Uh, hey, fellas, um, you, uh, remember Cambodia?”

Deacon nods, and his fingers twitch on the grip of his gun. They’re going to have to do this fast and carefully. There’s two guys back here, and at least two more up front, and they’re all in full tac gear. He and the rest of the Deltas are in the clothes they were wearing as civilians. If any of them catches a bullet…

The truck begins to slow, and Deacon frowns. _ This ain’t good. _ They pull over to the side of the road, and all pretense of nicety gone, Lawlor’s guards shout at them to get out of the truck. They do, slowly. 

“From here on, we’re walking,” One of the men says, but there’s nothing sincere in his voice. And the men stepping out from the cab of the truck and joining their teammates look like they mean business. Deacon’s all too aware that their guns aren’t held relaxed for hiking through the jungle. Their fingers are on the triggers, and they’re ready to mow down everyone in the team as soon as they get far enough in the jungle that the bodies will simply disappear. 

Suddenly, Jack and Lanier grab the guys holding guns on them, grappling for the weapons and forcing them away from the others. Deacon turns on one of the other two, and it looks like Mac and Fitzy are teaming up to take on the fourth. 

Mac grabs something off the guy’s belt and runs back toward the truck. He pops the hood latches, flings it inside, then runs back toward them, stumbling a little when the front of the vehicle ignites in a massive explosion. _ He just tossed a grenade in there. _

“Hell yeah!” Deacon claps Mac on the back, it’s the kind of rough horseplay they all congratulate each other with. But Mac freezes and shudders slightly before getting himself under control. _ Damn it, you need to remember he’s got trauma too. _ Deacon doesn’t know if it was abusive family or something that happened later. He adjusts his action, slinging an arm around the kid’s shoulder instead. “Nice job, man. You’re as crazy as Dalton, you know that?”

* * *

SOMEWHERE IN THE HONDURAN JUNGLE

“How'd you know?” Fitzy asks as they trudge through the scrubby undergrowth. _ Even if Mac hadn’t blown the truck, it wouldn’t have been safe to use it. _ Jack’s sure Lawlor would have his vehicles equipped with a GPS system, and he’d have tracked them. Still, jungle hikes have never been his favorite. 

“Die Hard 2, baby!” Jack chuckles. “Mac, how’d _ you _ know?”

“The truck,” Mac says. “Couldn’t you smell it?”

“Smell what?” Jack asks. “I couldn’t smell anything over that guard’s BO. Man, that was bad.” 

Mac chuckles. “That truck was used to transport explosives. Lawlor and his men had no need for that much firepower, not unless they were hitting the rebel stronghold itself. And I couldn’t stop thinking about why Worthy was working alone, when Lawlor has a crew that big. But he was working alone because he couldn’t trust them.” 

“So Lawlor and his people were blowing up the tracks?” Jack asks. 

“Yeah. Probably if we ask Riley to do a little more digging into his financials, we’ll hit a paper trail.”

“Damn, that might have been what she was trying to tell me,” Jack says. “No signal.” 

“We have a sat phone now,” Mac says, holding one up. “Took it off one of Lawlor’s guys. And a radio.” 

“Nice, now we got a way to listen in on them,” Deacon says. 

“Prob’ly not for long,” Lanier replies. “Lawlor’s a pro. Soon as he knows we hit the truck, he’s going to have to assume we have some of his gear, and he’ll change frequencies.” Jack nods. He takes the sat phone from Mac and dials Riley’s number. It rings and goes to voicemail, so he calls the War Room instead, where Bozer picks up.

“Hey Boze, this is Jack.”

“Jack! We were worried,” he says. “Hey Riley, Jack’s fine. And Mac?” he asks after a beat. 

“He’s fine too.”

“They’re okay.” He sighs. “She was worried about you guys when her call didn’t go through. She did some more digging into Lawlor’s financials. He was double-dipping, taking money from the government to protect the tracks, and from the insurgents to blow them up.”

“Thanks. We found out the hard way,” Jack says. “But at least now there’s some hard evidence.” 

“And Riley found out there’s part of the CCTV footage missing too, the part that would have showed whoever planted that device. She’s trying to reconstruct that, but it’s gonna take a while.”

“Good luck. Stay safe back there, Bozer, and remind Riley for me. Okay?” He hangs up. “Well, guys, looks like we’ve got proof now.” 

“Man, I haven't felt this sore since Kandahar,” Munoz mutters as they continue to walk up a steep slope of the foothills. 

Fitzy shakes his head. “What? Munoz, you slept through damn near half that op.” 

“I wasn't sleeping, Fitzy, a frag blew me headfirst into a wall. Yeah, I was unconscious.”

“Call it what you want,” Fitzy chuckles. “I’m gonna head up front, take a turn with the machete.”

Jack is only too glad to hand the job over for a while. He’s got slashes from sharp leaves and vines all over him, and if possible, the bugs are worse up front than in the middle of the group. He falls back into line, behind Mac who’s fiddling with the radio, next to Munoz.

Mac stumbles over something on the trail, and catches himself against a tree, but Jack sees a flash of panic in his eyes for a second, that old fear of being on the ground and defenseless is resurfacing. 

Omar must have seen it too, because he turns to Jack with a frown. “What happened to him?” Munoz says softly. “He a combat vet too?”

Jack shakes his head. “Not exactly.” It’s all he can bring himself to say. He doesn’t want to talk about Mac’s abusive childhood or tell anyone that he was in prison, because he knows these guys will put the pieces together all too well. They’re smart. He hasn’t said much about Mac’s background or where he came from, not to any of them. Thorpe knows who Mac is, he lives close enough to L.A. to have heard about the case in the papers, but he also respects Mac’s privacy and would never tell anyone about him without permission. 

“Figured, when the explosions didn’t faze him but gettin’ clapped on the back did.” Munoz looks up at Jack. “And if I’m not mistaken, I recognize his face from one of the counterterrorism bulletins I’m still subscribed to.” 

Jack sighs. There’s no getting around Omar, the guy was their interrogation expert for a good reason. 

“I’m guessing your ‘Mac’ is none other than Angus MacGyver. I was wondering when I first saw the pictures you shared with us, but given what I just saw him do to that truck...” Jack can only nod. “Word was going around that some government agency sprung him and got his name cleared. Guess it’s whatever one you’re with now, then?” 

Jack nods again, he’s fighting a losing battle trying to keep secrets here. “Yeah. He’s a good kid, man. He was just tryin’ to do the right thing.”

“So I heard.” Munoz glances at Mac, who’s now talking to Fitzy about something that Jack guesses must be explosives. “Glad someone was willing to take a chance on him. A kid like that in prison for life...” 

Jack feels an irrational desire to punch Omar. It’s not his fault he’s good at reading a situation, that he can feel out people’s weak points, even unintentionally. “That kid’s been through hell and back, as much as any of us. And he don’t need people prying.”

“I wasn’t going to. You know me better than that, Jack,” Munoz says with a small smile. “But I also know you can’t really be rational when something concerns your own kids.” He glances from Mac to Jack again. “Whatever that kid went through, he’s lucky he’s got you watching his six.” 

Jack realizes Lanier was listening to the whole thing when he falls into step with the two of them. _ Damn, that man is quiet. _ Jack’s never failed to be impressed by pretty much everything about Sid. The guy looks like he could bench-press an elephant, but he’s consistently been the most soft-hearted of the team, and he’s also the most stealthy. 

“Didn’t mean to hear something I wasn’t meant to, but it was hard to miss some things.” Lanier shifts his gun on his shoulder. “Besides, I’ve known the kid’s hurtin’ since I saw him.” He shakes his head. “You spend enough time around people with that kind of damage, you learn to recognize the signs.” 

Jack’s glad when the conversation is broken up by Deacon obliviously shoehorning his way in. _ As usual. _ “Yo, how much further to Worthy?” 

“Yeah, let me check my phone.” Jack reaches for his pocket, then frowns. “Oh, ha, ha, very funny. Who took my phone? Mac?”

Mac holds up his hands with an innocent look. 

“Oh, you cannot be serious,” Deacon says. “Please tell me you're kidding.”

“I must've lost my phone when we were tanglin’ with Lawlor's guys, man.” Now he remembers a hand on his pocket, he was too busy trying not to die to think about it then. “They musta seen the coordinates on it and lifted it.” 

“Oh, we missed you, Dalton,” Munoz chuckles. 

“Stand down,” Jack shakes his head. “That phone…”

“Was our only shot at finding Worthy.”

“Not exactly,” Jack says. “I got a man back home.” He pulls out the sat phone. “Thorpe’s ready and waiting to give us some support from back home.” He sighs. “But Worthy’s coordinates were on there. And now that Lawlor’s men got their hands on it…”

“All right, we need transport, fast,” Hern says. 

“Well, we got a sat phone,” Jack grumbles. “Guess they wanted a fair trade.” He dials Thorpe’s number. “Hey man, we ran into a little scrape. Think you could pull up those fancy satellite tools I gave you and see where the closest spot we can find a vehicle would be?” 

* * *

Riley scans the room as she and Leanna walk into the Sparkman House. It’s almost exactly the same as she remembers it, aside from the faces of the guests. She recognizes several from their lists of most-wanted at the Phoenix, and her fingers itch for her tac knife and several sets of handcuffs. _ Focus. You’re here for Penn. _

She can almost hear Jack’s commentary on this party. The guest list, the food, and the drinks would all be subjected to the particular Dalton brand of scrutiny. Jack’s made her laugh so hard she almost ruined an op more than once with his comments. _ I think his best one was probably ‘If you’re going to invite the head of the local Yakuza, you should probably make sure your sushi doesn’t taste like cardboard.’ _

Her stomach rolls, and not at the thought of the likely-to-give-you-food-poisoning hors d’ouerves she’s run into on more than one occasion. She’s glad Jack made contact with Bozer while she and Leanna were still en route to the party, she’s not sure she could have convincingly maintained a cover while worried sick about Jack, wondering if he was even still alive. _ When I found everything about Lawlor, and then I couldn’t get hold of Jack or Mac... _

As if on cue, Bozer’s voice snaps her back to the mission. “All right, ladies. Now remember, you're actresses hired to work this party. Get in good with Penn and steal his phone. And if being nice doesn’t work, Matty says do whatever it takes.” 

Riley whispers an affirmative. The music is loud, but not so loud it’s distracting. Just enough that someone probably won’t hear the click of a gun or the swish of an unsheathed knife until it’s too late. 

Bozer continues. “Leanna, your camera is online and I've got a clean image. Guys, I see Terry Penn. Straight ahead.”

Riley and Leanna work their way through the crowd to Penn. He looks on edge and halfway to pure terror, his eyes wide, sweat shimmering on his forehead. 

Trying to make herself sound as vapid and oblivious as possible, Riley holds out her hand and smiles. “Hi. I'm Roberta.”

“I'm Lilian,” Leanna says with an equally large smile. “Great party, right?” 

Penn barely glances at them. “Actually, I'm looking for somebody.”

“I'd say you found someone,” Riley says, letting her fingers trail up the man’s arm and suppressing the shudder at doing it. _ Cage was always better at playing coy. _

“Two someones,” Leanna says with a smile. 

“Mm-hmm,” Penn says distractedly. 

“So what do you do?” Leanna asks, continuing to pry. Penn starts to move away, tucking his phone into his jacket pocket as he does so. 

Bozer sighs though the comms. “Okay, the charm offensive isn't working. Maybe if you spill something on his jacket, he'll take it off and you’ll have a few seconds to grab it…”

_ Too obvious. _Instead of spilling a drink, Riley sneezes, then rubs her arms.

Leanna catches on, reaching over to feel Riley’s shoulder. “Oh, my God, you're freezing. She has the chills.”

Riley looks at her with wide eyes. “My audition. What am I gonna do?” 

Leanna looks up at Penn with an Oscar-worthy look of desperation. “She has this really big audition tomorrow, huge, and if she gets sick, then...Hey, do you think maybe she could borrow your jacket?” Penn pulls his phone out of the pocket, shoves it into his pants pocket, and hands over the coat. 

“Sure. Here you go.” 

“Thank you,” Riley says. 

“Mm-hmm,” Penn says, still distracted. 

“So did you say you were a producer?” Leanna asks. “You look like a producer.” Riley’s comms buzz and she turns away from the conversation.

“Yeah Boze?”

“Uh, Riley, I think you got a problem.”

“What is it, Bozer?” 

“You got a four-man team coming in the back, and I don't think they're there for the cocktails,” Bozer says. “Gotta move.”

And then the doors fly open and four men in masks race in. Leanna looks up, flawlessly draws her gun, and fires. People starts screaming and ducking, and Riley sees one of the men go down with a groan. Leanna grabs the stunned Penn’s arm, pulling him toward another door. “Listen, we're government agents. We know who you are. Come with us if you want to live.”

* * *

SOMEWHERE IN HONDURAS

THIS ISN’T A CAR DEALERSHIP

The vehicle Ryan Thorpe found for them isn’t exactly for sale. It’s a farm truck whose owner has stopped off at a small local bar for a drink with some of his profits before returning home. And, after a cursory inspection of the truck, it appears the man had sense enough to take his keys with him.

Mac shrugs, pops open the hood, and pulls Jack’s dogtags out of his pocket. “I’m just gonna bypass the ignition.”

The truck is old enough that he’s able to short out the solenoid, and the engine roars to life, coughing, but rumbling. 

“We could've used this kid back in the day,” Deacon says with a chuckle. “Okay, guys, mount up. And don’t complain about the smell, it’s better than the goat truck in Mali.”

Jack climbs in the driver’s seat, and Mac rides shotgun. He’s getting the odd feeling that Jack wants to talk to him. 

Jack calls Thorpe again, asking for an update on the situation, and their destination. 

“All right, Jack, the eye in the sky says the road up ahead is clear, free of hostiles.” Thorpe says. “Should have a clear shot to Worthy if you take the first turn off the main road heading left into the hills. Over.”

“Copy that, buddy. Appreciate you having our backs, that's for sure.” Mac frowns. _ Thorpe’s got to feel like the outsider. Like he’s stuck there, unable to help Worthy at all. _ He’s glad that there’s something Ryan can do for them. _ Bozer talks about how hard it is to watch us from the War Room. That’s got to be how Thorpe feels right now. _He swallows and looks back at Jack, trying not to think about the people who have to be worrying about them right now.

“You know, just because Lawlor has the phone, it doesn't mean he found the video. Riley’s got all our tech encrypted really well.” 

“Yeah, when she’s had her hands on it, Mac, that phone was my replacement cause I let you rip mine apart that one day you were bored, remember?” Mac nods slowly. “No, Lawlor is a pro, man. I'm telling you, he found the video. I-I can't let anything happen to Worthy.”

“Jack, what’s...what happened with you and Worthy?”

“Ah...Mac, you know how you were at first? Pushing everybody away that wanted to help?”

“Ouch. But...true.” Mac shifts in his seat. 

“Well, that’s what I did to Worthy, man. He was the first to come see me after a real bad rotation. I got home and I couldn't adjust. I was in a dark place. I was in a really, really dark place, and I couldn't turn it off. And then Worthy showed up. He tried to get me to talk, but I wouldn’t have any of it. So he brought me my dog, like Mickey, you remember me sayin’?” Mac nods. “We were never the same after that. We still fought together, he saved my life in Bogota a few years later, but...I always just saw someone who knew I was damaged. Who’d seen me broken. Hard to look at someone again when you know that.” 

Mac nods. 

“He saved my life in more ways than one. And I never...I was too ashamed to thank him for it.” Jack sighs. 

“I think he knows.” Mac swallows and leans on the window, blinking hard. “But now I know why you wouldn’t leave me alone.”

“Just cause I’ve had a few more years to process the trauma don’t mean it ain’t there.” Jack says. His voice is a little rough too. 

“Don’t you mean a few decades, old man?” Mac chuckles weakly. 

“Come on now kid, don’t be talkin’ crap about me around these guys. Fitzy will kick your skinny ass.” 

“Honestly, I thought it would be Lanier.”

“Nah, dude, the guy’s a freakin’ Saint Bernard. Looks kinda scary, but he’s the nicest guy you’ll ever meet. Why you think he voluntarily spends all his time around elementary schoolers?”

Mac chuckles, but the sound is wet. “I’m sorry, Jack.”

“What for, dude? That kinda came out of nowhere.”

“For...for needing you all the time, for not remembering that you aren’t always okay either.”

“Okay, hold on now, did you understand nothing of the point of what I just said about Worthy?” Jack shakes his head. “I pushed one of my brothers away because I was hurtin’ and not thinking straight. And still, I know when I see him he won’t hold nothin’ against me.” Jack sighs. “I kept him at arm’s length for literal years, dude. And I still haven’t really told him, even though we talk. But guys like us, we get it. Trauma messes up your head, and you aren’t to blame for needing help.” Jack winces as the truck pounds through a pothole. “Listen, I’m seein’ a Phoenix therapist same as you. And I may not see these guys in person, but we keep up a Facebook group, as suburban mom as that sounds.” 

“I just...don’t want to be a-”

“Don’t you dare say burden, or I will toss you back there to those guys and not let you out till every one of them has told you the same thing about trauma.” Jack sighs. “Mac, I’m in a good place now. I wasn’t then. I couldn’t even leave my house, I was paranoid, I was hurting and I mean, I-I-I couldn't even leave my house. Walkin’ from tip to tail of that place talking to myself, crying all the time, you know, nightmares…” He sighs. “My girlfriend couldn’t handle it, she walked out. But my family, they never left me. And you’re family, and now it’s my turn to help you. Listen, kid, if things get rough for me, you will know.” 

“But they are.” Mac swallows. “I hear your nightmares.” He bites his lip. “You’re always screaming at Murdoc to stop, or shouting for me.” 

“Dude, I’ve been having nightmares about Murdoc and you since we met that son of a bitch. You just notice ‘em more now that we live together all the time.” Jack smiles. “But if it makes you feel better, I’ll tell you when I’m having a rough day. As long as _ you _promise to do exactly the same thing.” 

* * *

Sid Lanier hasn’t held a gun since he got out of Deltas. But the all too familiar feeling of his hand tightening on it as they approach their destination hasn’t faded from his mind. He can feel danger in the air, like the oppressive humid heat that’s pressing down on all of them, like the thick smell of rotting leaves coming from the jungle floor.

He’s never been a man to dismiss gut feelings. Not about his kids when something isn’t right in their faces, and not about an op. And everything is telling him that this is about to go sideways in a very big way.

It looks like everyone is feeling the same. Jack’s left eye is twitching, the way it does when he’s agitated or lying. Deacon is humming repetitively under his breath. Fitzy is biting his lip. Munoz is tapping a finger on his trigger-guard. And Mac...Mac’s tapping his fingers on his leg and twisting a paperclip through his fingers.

_ I’ve seen that kind of thing before. _Sid’s seen so many kids come in the office with similar actions. Kids who parents and teachers call problems, say they can’t deal with. And often, all they need is someone who’s willing to see them as more than one thing. As more than tapping fingers or rocking motions or shuffling feet, as a child instead of a problem to solve. 

He wonders how long it took Mac to find someone who would see him like that. It’s clear Jack does, he’s seen the man hand Mac more paperclips as he goes through his own stash. _ People think their kids will grow out of it. They’re disappointed when they carry those habits into adulthood. They don’t understand, and they punish them. _ But Jack is kind. Because he understands what it’s like to live with a mind that to some people, would be seen as abnormal. He understands paranoia, stress, anxiety. 

Jack holds up a hand to stop them all. “Well, these are the coordinates that Worthy sent.”

“I don't see anybody,” Fitzy says. 

“Maybe Lawlor didn't find Worthy's video,” Mac says hesitantly.

And then a rattle of gunfire breaks the natural sound of the jungle. 

“Okay, that's it, gentlemen, we're on, let's go!” Jack shouts, plunging into the undergrowth, gun at the ready. Lanier follows him. “I got eyes on Worthy!” Jack yells, stopping short in the clearing ahead. 

“So does Lawlor,” Deacon shouts, pointing to a group of men advancing through the forest. 

“Down!” Jack shouts, and they all hit the dirt as gunfire peppers the trees around them, shredding leaves. “This ain't good.”

* * *

Leanna spins their car around the corner, watching in the rearview as the black SUV behind them chases after them. They’re not gaining, not yet. The car Phoenix loaned them is a good one. And after a brief exchange of gunfire, these guys seem to have figured out that they’re chasing a car with not only bulletproof glass and plating, but also the new and improved puncture-proof tires the lab’s been working on. 

Riley turns around, glancing into the back of the car where Penn is sitting, looking shell-shocked. “Okay, I got to ask. Why do your friends back there want you dead?” 

Penn sighs. “So I put a mafia don in contact with a lady friend who I thought moved stolen jewelry, but turned out to be an undercover FBI agent. And now the don is on trial, and blaming me for the whole mess. So to thank me, he greenlit me.”

“If you're marked for death, why show your face at a party?” Leanna asks, then shifts her attention back to the rearview mirror and the road ahead. 

“'Cause a person who RSVP'd yes to that party owes me almost a hundred K.” Penn glances fearfully back over his shoulder at the black SUV. “Money I really needed to drop off the grid and stay off.”

Leanna shakes her head. _ Some people’s idea of what they need is so skewed. _ Her backup plan if things go south and she has to run for the rest of her life is much less expensive. But people who are used to a life of luxury don’t know what to do without it. 

“Well, look, you hand over that phone of yours and we'll make sure you live through this,” Riley says. 

“I can't give you my phone,” Penn insists. 

“The only thing you got that we want is that phone. So give it up or get the hell out the car. Leanna, slow down,” Riley says.

_ Okay, well, that just sounds crazy, but I trust Riley. _ Leanna relaxes her pressure on the gas pedal, and the car slows enough to allow the SUV to start inching up beside them. Leanna’s careful not to give it enough space to shove the rear of their car off the road, but Penn can’t know that, and he looks absolutely terrified. 

“No, wait. What are you doing? They'll kill me,” He gasps. “Fine. Fine, take it. It's no good to me anyway if I'm dead.”

As soon as Riley has the phone in her hand, Leanna puts the pedal to the metal again, pulling ahead of the SUV and whipping around another corner. 

Bozer’s voice is just a little shaky over the comms. “Riley, Leanna, you're insane. Brilliant, but insane. All right, now, follow my directions and I'll get you to safety.”

* * *

Mac watching the team of Deltas fall into an attacking pattern like a well-oiled machine. Jack seems to have unofficially become the new leader, he’s calling the shots now and no one seems to have a problem with it. “Okay, let's party. Flanking right: Cerveza, Fitzy, Lanier. Show them what that gun can do, big boy. We'll come down main street, clean it up and save Worthy. Hooah.”

There’s an echo from the men, all speaking together. “Hooah.”

“Hold on, hold on, hold on,” Mac says, reaching for the radio. 

“Kid's got an idea,” Deacon says, shaking his head. Mac knows they’re impressed so far, but he also knows that if he makes a mistake it could cost these guys their lives. He has to focus. 

“We are going to bring the noise.” He begins taking the radio apart, as carefully as he can while still keeping an eye on the gunfire ahead. Worthy’s holding his own pretty well against all those men, from his hiding space behind a downed tree, but then Mac hears a grunt of pain. He must have been hit. Mac needs to hurry.

“I knew I liked this kid,” Deacon chuckles, still watching. Mac figures he has experience with children who are far too curious about anything they can take apart. 

“Yeah, just don't bust your phone out around him,” Jack says wryly. Mac flinches at the sound of more gunfire. He’s running out of time. He pops the back of the radio open with his teeth before remembering he had his knife in his pocket. Sometimes it’s still easy to forget he has resources, that this isn’t his time with Murdoc. “See what I mean? Kid’s a literal puppy,” Jack chuckles, in spite of the situation.

Mac makes a few final adjustments. Munoz is glancing over his shoulder, the guy looks confused as to what’s happening, but he won’t be in a few minutes. “You ever put something back together the way it was before you broke it?” He asks. 

“Where's the fun in that?” Mac asks, before starting to tear off pieces of his shirt and wadding them up into small earplugs. “All right, everyone, take some of these. Put them in your ears. You _ will _ need them.”

“Just put them in there, trust me,” Jack says.

Mac switches on the radio, and even with the makeshift earplugs in, the feedback whining is almost unbearable. He shudders, his head is suddenly pounding. _ I forgot the headache. _ He didn’t forget the pills, he took one at the right time as usual, but it’s becoming such a habit that he kind of forgot _ why _ he takes medication. 

Lawlor’s men are shouting, and Mac watches them fall back into the treeline, shaking their heads like dogs trying to chase off flies. Jack rushes up and kneels beside Worthy, holding out one of the sets of earplugs. The man takes them with a grateful nod, as Mac gestures to his own ears to mime the intended use. 

“Hey, Worthy,” Jack shouts over the feedback.

“Jack. Jack, what the hell is that sound?” 

“That's the sound of salvation,” Jack chuckles, pulling the man back into the treeline. Mac hears the radio crackle as it runs out of battery, and he clips it onto his belt anyway. He might want the parts. 

Worthy hisses as Lanier examines his wound. “It's a clean shot, through and through. He'll be fine.” He presses an extra shirt against the hole and ties it on with the sleeves. Mac’s done that more than a few times himself. It’s passable field care until they get Worthy to a medic. 

Worthy groans in pain at the pressure, bu staggers to his feet anyway. “Hell of a reunion, fellas.”

“Save that for American soil. Let's get out of here,” Deacon says. 

“All right, let's go.” 

There’s a crackling sound of feet in the brush, and then Mac hears another rattle of gunfire. Lawlor’s guys must have noticed the debilitating sound is gone, and they’re coming back for round two. 

Jack pulls out the sat phone. “Okay, Thorpe, we got Worthy. We're on the move, but we're taking fire. We need cover, fast.”

“Go west, young man,” Thorpe advises. “Three klicks, I'm looking at some kind of structure there.” 

“Copy that. You're the man,” Jack says. “Okay, guys, Ryan’s got us a place to hole up and figure something out.”

Jack stops abruptly when they get to another small clearing, this one ringed by burnt stumps. It looks like someone was trying to start a farm, and gave up and left. Mac doesn’t let his mind wander to anything darker than that.

The building is a low little shack, barely standing, in the middle of a small clearing. “This must be the place Thorpe was talking about,” Deacon says. “Remind me to tell him to get his eyes checked, because this barely qualifies as a structure, let alone shelter.”

“To be fair, we did ask him to find ‘something’,” Lanier mutters, glancing around the small building. “It’s…better than nothing.”

“I guess this is where Dalton's Heroes make their last stand.” Mac turns slowly around in the middle of the room, cataloging their options. There isn’t a lot here to work with, even for him. He can see a few cans and boxes of chemicals, most of them corroded or waterlogged, and the walls are thin boards. They won’t hold up to gunfire for very long. The Deltas are already pushing anything moveable up against the walls to create makeshift fortifications. There are some pieces of pipe, and that looks like stump remover in those milk jugs…He’s getting the beginnings of a plan now.

Lanier checks his gun’s mag and shakes his head. “Not enough.”

“It never is, big boy, never is,” Munoz says.

Jack glances at Mac, and from the look on his face, he can tell Mac’s getting close to coming up with something. “Okay, so what's the plan you got cooking there, kiddo?”

“Uh…” Mac turns around. “Fitzy, you got any det cord left?”

“Uh, yeah, uh, less than twenty feet.”

Mac frowns, rubbing his forehead and trying to think how far he can make that amount stretch. “That's not a lot, but we can make it work.”

“Make it work for what?” 

“Bangalore Torpedoes. You want to help me build some?” Mac asks.

Fitzy grins. “Hell yeah.”

“Well, those sound like something that could blow off parts of me I’d rather keep, so I’ll leave you two bomb nerds to the things that blow up and help these guys move heavy objects around,” Jack chuckles, making a show of rolling up nonexistent sleeves and showing his muscles. “Gonna go be the tank part of this think tank. Right, Deacon?” 

With Fitzy’s help, assembling several of the explosive devices doesn’t take too long. Jack stops to check on the progress every time he walks past. “You look way too happy about making things that explode, hoss,” he chuckles. But Mac knows he doesn’t really mean it, and he can see from Jack’s face that he’s glad to see Mac smiling that way. _ It’s nice to know I’m still good at this. _ Even his mood swings are finally improving. _ As if that matters unless we can walk away from this today… _

He shakes the thought off and walks outside with Fitzy to help set the torpedoes. The jungle is calm for now, only the occasional bird cry or monkey scream, and the ever-present buzzing of insects. Still, Mac is on high alert as he helps lay out the explosives, and he’s glad to be back inside the menial protection of the shack. 

All the men gather around, putting their hands in the center of a circle. Mac watches. This isn’t his tradition, or his place to try to shoehorn in. “South of the border,” Jack says, and there’s a hink of sadness in his tone. 

“Still not in hell.” It’s echoed by every one of the men, a kind of bond they’ve forged in blood, sweat and tears. 

“That's right, still not in hell,” Jack says. “Let’s keep it that way.”

Worthy looks up from where he’s sitting propped on a rickety stool by one of the windows, giving him a vantage point to shoot but also allowing him to rest. “Guys, I want to thank you. All of you. I'm sorry I got you into this.”

Deacon shakes his head. “No. I'm sorry. We should've told you to stick it when you refused money for your son's surgery. We shoulda known you weren’t telling us everything.” 

Jack shakes his head. “Hey, hey. None of us are ever alone as long as we don't turn our backs on each other.”

“Right,” Munoz says. 

“That's right,” Lanier nods. 

Mac decides it’s time to stop hiding on the fringes. Jack brought him for a reason, he wants Mac to feel like he belongs here. So Mac has to start working on that. “Look, uh, you guys have been through a lot together, and I know I'm not exactly part of the team, but what do you say we show these guys we're not going down without a fight?”

The answering “Hooah!” lights a warm feeling in Mac’s chest that turns into a determined fire. And just in time.

Deacon glances out one of the windows as the jungle noises still, the animals disturbed by the intrusion of something or someone foreign to them. “They're here.”

“Don’t fire till you see the whites of their eyes,” Jack whispers. “Make every bullet count, cause we ain’t got a lot. And these guys are wearing tac, so be sure and hit ‘em where it hurts.” 

Mac can see that the men (he counts nine but if his estimations from the airfield are right, there should have been a dozen in Lawlor’s truck) have broken up into three groups, moving in to hit the house from three sides. He guesses the remaining men are covering the only other wall. 

One of the groups is moving a little faster, they’re almost at the torpedo line on their side. Mac nots to Fitzy. “Fitzy? Want to do the honors?” 

“All right, boys. Fire in the hole!” Fitzy shouts, and the resulting explosion clearly startles the attackers. Mac watches most of them regroup, it looks like one hasn’t gotten up. He swallows hard, even though these guys want to put them all in the ground, he still hates it when what he does kills. Maybe the guy isn’t dead, just too smart to try and attack again. 

Two more assaults, and two more uses of the rest of the torpedoes later, there are four more men down, a combination of the explosives and the Deltas’ shooting skills. But it hasn’t been without damage taken on their own side too. A lucky shot through the boards buried itself in Lanier’s thigh, and a grenade one of Lawlor’s guys managed to toss up against the wall created shrapnel that’s injured Jack and Munoz both, although it’s relatively minor. 

“That's it, I'm out,” Hern says suddenly, turning to crouch down behind the flipped table he’s been using as cover. 

Jack fires once more, and Mac hears a cry of pain from outside, but then he drops the mag out of his gun and holds it up. “I'm out.”

Lanier and Munoz manage to get off a few more rounds from their assault rifles, and Lanier says he’s gotten another hit, but then both of them sigh and toss the guns aside. “I'm out, too,” Lanier says, his voice thick with pain. 

“This is it, boys,” Hern says, pulling out his tactical knife and holding it in a fighter’s grip across his chest. Around the room, Mac watches the rest of the Deltas do the same. Jack has his own blade out, and the kind of grin on his face he gets when they charge headfirst into a mission they have almost no chance of surviving. 

“Blood makes the grass grow,” He says, and there’s both a berserker kind of confidence and also a pained realization in his voice. 

_ We’re not all walking away from this kind of a fight. _ By Mac’s count their defenses have already taken out seven of Lawlor’s team, which leaves another four plus the leader still intact. The Deltas outnumber them, but there’s no way their knives are a match for the guns Lawlor and his team still have, and even if they manage to win, they’ll take heavy losses. _ We have no real protection, and some of us are injured. _ Mac glances around the room, wondering which of them won’t go home. Maybe he’ll be one of them. 

Mac takes a deep breath, his fingers clenched stiffly around the handle of his own SAK, the only real weapon he still has. _ At least if this is how I go, it’s with Jack. _It’s a whole lot better than the way he used to imagine he’d die when he was a vigilante, all alone with no one who cared…

_But they never killed me then, and if I play my cards right, these guys won’t be able to either._ He’s fought much worse odds. But not with brute force. _I always brought a knife to a gun fight. And I almost always won. _

He turns to Jack. “I think I might have a plan that means we don’t have to go out in a blaze of glory.”

“I’m listening.” 

* * *

SOMEWHERE IN LOS ANGELES

NOT THE GOOD PART

Riley has no idea where Bozer is trying to send them. She knows L.A. well, and this part...she watches the walls get thick with cartel and gang graffiti, and the streets become lined with abandoned, condemned buildings. They’re going deeper into the belly of the beast, not getting away from it. And the black SUV is still on their tail. 

“Okay, Leanna, you're doing great,” Bozer says. “Now take your next left and then an immediate right.”

Leanna does, but that ends them in a blind alley. Riley stares at the La Ola cartel designs on the sheer wall in front of them. The black SUV screeches to a halt behind them, blocking the only way out. 

“Ladies, what the hell have you done?” Penn shouts. 

“That's a good question,” Riley mumbles. _ Bozer had to know that wall was there, but what… _ “Bozer?” 

“Trust me, Riley. I got this.”

“We trust you, Boze. But whatever you're planning, you need to do it now,” Leanna says, and Riley can hear the faint shudder in her voice as the vehicle behind them opens its doors. She pulls out her knife and lays it in her lap, knowing it’s almost useless against the guns they have. But their car is bulletproofed, and these guys know that now._ They have to make us get out of the car to kill us. _ So she has a chance. 

_ This is the kind of insane thing Jack would do. _ She swallows at the thought. She’s been trying to keep her mind off Jack, and what kind of trouble he and Mac could be in in Honduras. 

A gun clicks outside her window, and she looks up. 

“Get out, Penn,” A voice snarls. And then there’s a rattle of gunfire, a thud on the roof of the car, and shouts from outside. Riley looks up to see a group of Pheonix tac team agents taking on their assailants. The fight is over in seconds. 

“You can come out now.” Riley chuckles at the sound of the thick Aussie accent, and opens her door just as Cage hops gracefully down from the roof of the car, gun still in hand. 

“Catwoman to the rescue!” Bozer says triumphantly.

“How did you…” Riley asks.

“Gomez started cooperating. He’s pretty pissed off about his successor trying to have him killed to take over La Ola, and he’s finally decided to get his revenge.” Cage grins. “He gave us the location of three warehouses in L.A. where there were large amounts of product being stored, so I took a team to hit one and make sure he was telling the truth. And we were still in the area when Bozer called and said you could use a little help.” 

“Thanks for the save.” Riley chuckles. “And Bozer? Next time, could you ruin your own dramatic mmoment by at least telling us we’re not going to die?”

* * *

Jack can tell from the look in Mac’s eyes that he has a new idea. He’s scanning the room again, and when his eyes light on a tatttered old tarp, he grabs it, holding it up and turning to the others. “Guys, I have a plan, but we...kind of have to let them in.” 

“Are you insane?” Deacon asks. 

“Yeah, but in a good way,” Jack replies. “It can’t be worse than our odds out there.” Lawlor’s men are closing in again. And there’s only one door out, right into the thick of them. 

“We have to hide Worthy. As long as he’s alive, these guys need us alive to find him,” Mac says. He’s spreading the tarp over the floor, in the center of the room. “We need to tell them we let him go and holed up here to stall for time.”

“Oh, I see where this is going,” Jack says. “What’s the tarp for, dude?”

“Lawlor’s the boss. We take him, we have the upper hand on his guys.” Mac says. “Lawlor’s not so different from a cartel lieutenant. He likes giving orders, and he likes finding guys who accept them unquestioningly. Which is why Worthy took him by surprise, and why taking him out is going to give us a few second of confusion, long enough to deal with his goons.” 

“Okay, but the tarp is for?” Hern asks.

“Oh, right, sorry.” Mac shakes his head the way he does when he gets lost in his own mind and has to come back out. “We need to bait Lawlor into stepping on it, so Worthy can yank it out from under him from his hiding place. Mac moves a small locker and the table, sliding the end of the tarp between them. “Stay back there, and whatever happens, stay quiet. If Lawlor knows he has us all, we’re dead.” 

Worthy nods and climbs over the table, ducking down into the hiding space. Mac motions for all the Deltas to move back, to the other side of the tarp. 

The door flies open with a crash, and Jack watches as the men storm into the room. A couple are bleeding from arm wounds, and one has some nasty burns on his face and neck. _ We did a lot of damage. _ Jack’s pretty proud of his team.

The goons level their guns at the group, while Lawlor’s piercing grey eyes scan the room. “Where’s Worthy?” He snarls. 

Jack steps forward, just a little. _ Piss him off enough to want to get physical, but not enough to make him shoot you right here. _“Oh, he’s long gone. High-tailed it out of here with all the evidence he had on him of what you’ve been doing to the tracks.” It’s a bluff, the only real hard evidence they have is Riley’s financials snooping. But Lawlor can’t be sure. And that’s what Jack is banking on. “So if you want to know where he is, you need us.”

“I don’t need all of you,” Lawlor says, taking a step forward. One boot is now resting firmly on the tarp. “So start talking, or start bleeding.” 

Worthy grabs the tarp and yanks it backward. Startled, the man loses his balance and falls, slamming his head against the hard ground, and Jack grabs his gun and turns it on the four remaining goons, aiming for the unprotected heads. “All of you, against the wall. Now. My trigger finger’s gettin’ a little itchy here, and I figure I can get enough rounds off to take you all with me if you shoot.”

The men slowly drop their guns, and the Deltas, at least the uninjured ones, rush forward to take them and then tie the men up with their own zipties. Jack turns back to grab Lawlor as well, even though the guy’s unconscious. And stops dead in his tracks at the sight in front of him.

Lawlor is back on his feet, holding a knife to Mac’s throat. “I’m walking out of here. You try and stop me, he dies.” Jack meets Mac’s eyes, but the kid doesn’t look scared. He looks determined, and he gives Jack a tiny nod. _ That’s the ‘I have a stupid dangerous plan, please let me do it’ look. _

“Okay, let him go,” Jack says, and the Deltas move back. There’s murder in all their eyes, Jack can tell they’ve adopted Mac into their ranks and they don’t want to see anything happen to him now. It looks like Lanier might be preparing for a surprise attack, the way he’s holding his knife.

But Mac beats him to it. In a move he’s practiced a hundred times with Jack, he brings a hand up in front of his shoulder, the back of his arm forcing Lawlor’s arm, and the knife, away from his throat. At the same time, he ducks, and drives his other elbow into Lawlor’s guy. The man stumbles a little, and Mac pulls away, just far enough to get his hands on the guy’s knife arm. 

Mac grabs the man’s arm, trying to twist the knife away. Lawlor shouts and pulls back, slashing out with the blade. Mac jumps aside and the knife embeds into the wooden wall. Lawlor tries to yank it out, and that’s his mistake. Jack watches with a satisfied smile as Lawlor stumbles backward, clutching his jaw. A second hit lays him out flat, this time for good.

“Hey kid, you okay?”

Mac is panting, shaking out his fist with a grimace, but he gives Jack a small nod.

“Damn, Jack, you taught him well,” Deacon says. 

“Oh, I didn’t teach him that.” Jack chuckles. “Kid used to take on the whole L.A. cartel scene. Couple o’ thugs like this, that’s nothin’ to him.” He yanks Lawlor up and zipties him as well, so hard the plastic cuts deep gouges into his wrists. “Okay, guys, let’s call the cavalry and go home.” 

This time, when the guys gather around to congratulate Mac, Jack sees that they’re holding back a little, keeping things gentle. _ They’re a tough crowd, but they’ve also all been through hell and back, and they recognize and respect that trauma. _ It didn’t take long for the whole team to pick up on Mac’s aversion to harsh touch, and Jack smiles watching them exchange fistbumps in place of slaps on the back, and use an arm around the shoulder instead of a chest bump. 

* * *

MAC AND JACK’S HOUSE

NOTHING HAS BLOWN UP HERE YET-FITZY AND MAC MIGHT CHANGE THAT SOON

Worthy pats Mickey’s head as the dog nuzzles up to him, whining at the sight of the sling on his arm. _ He’s seen plenty of those. _ Mac’s just glad that for once, he’s not the injured party. “Damn, he looks like yours, Jack.” Worthy grins. 

“Well, he oughta. I got him from the same people who trained McClane,” Jack says with a grin. “Mac named him Michelangelo, but he’s just Mickey now to all of us. Same as mine.” Jack slides a little closer to Worthy, and his voice lowers a little, Mac can tell he’s switching to serious Jack mode for a minute. “You know, man, I never really thanked you. For what you did. And I’m sorry I let us drift apart.”

Worthy shakes his head. “All’s forgiven, Jack. Honestly. I don’t hold anything against you for anything you said or did back then.” 

“Yeah, I know. But I gotta say it. In case you go and pull some new stupid stunt and try to get yourself killed.” 

“Hey, who wants some good news?” Riley asks, walking in. She agreed to come by, she’s met most of Jack’s team before, apparently, and they all wanted to see her again. Bozer and Leanna bowed out, according to Riley, Leanna plans to take Bozer to the Phoenix interrogation rooms, cuff him to a chair, and force him to watch at least the first season of Teen Titans. 

“Yeah,” Jack says with a grin.

“I just got word that the Honduran government has arrested Lawlor and his men. And they've confessed to blowing the tracks and framing Caleb Worthy.”

Deacon grins and high-fives Worthy’s good hand. “Which reminds me, Worthy. Next time you see an explosive lying on the ground, why don't you leave it to somebody who knows what the hell he's actually doing? All right?” Fitzy laughs. 

Riley sits down between Mac and Munoz. “It’s been a while, guys.”

“Too long. Jack brought you around one time and then dropped off the map,” Munoz says. “Always wondered if maybe he thought we weren’t fit company for a young lady like yourself to be around.”

“Young lady, my ass,” Riley says, taking a drink of her beer. “As I remember, Jack was the one who was encouraging me to drink you under the table.”

“Because he gave you enough of that damn Texas whiskey he knew you could hold your liquor,” Fitzy says with a grin. “Good to see you again, Riley.”

There’s a few minutes of greetings around the circle. Apparently, both Hern and Worthy hadn’t met Riley before, they’d bowed out of the last Deltas get-together because of their kids. And Mac is less than surprised to discover that the Jell-O incident Munoz’s wife was so upset about was a direct result of Jack and Riley being in the same room. 

Eventually, the conversation slows, and Worthy glances around the circle, smiling. “I want to tell you guys: I love you. I'm grateful. You dropped everything to pull my butt out of the fire. I'll never forget it.”

“Ah, it’s nothin’. We’re family,” Jack says. “I know I haven’t seen y’all in a few years. Things got kinda crazy round here for a while.”

“Looks like it,” Deacon says. “Kids kinda tie up your whole life, believe me I know.”

“Yeah, but they’re worth it.” Jack slings an arm around Mac’s shoulder, and reaches over to fistbump Riley. “Still, let's try not to let that happen again. Okay? It's too good to see you guys.”

“Sounds good to me,” Lanier says, and the others nod in agreement. 

Jack continues. “Keep each other accountable. You get what I'm saying, man, just, it's I think that we should get together at least twice a year. Make a commitment. Right here, right now. 'Cause this kind of bond, it doesn't grow on trees. As a matter of fact, trees ain't…”

Hern laughs. “Dalton, I think we got your point. Twice a year, every year.”

“Yeah, I'll stop there,” Jack says. 

“All right.”

“What about the new member of our group?” Thorpe asks. “Right?” 

“Yeah. I mean, if you want in,” Fitzy says. “It’s been nice having someone to talk to besides these science illiterates.” 

Munoz punches him. 

“Uh, hell yeah,” Mac says with a grin, and raises his bottle. “To Dalton's Heroes.”

“Dalton's Heroes,” the others echo.

“Ooh, I like the sound of that,” Jack says.

“Yeah.” Riley grins. 

Eventually, the group begins to thin out. Thorpe has horses to see to, Lanier has a job to get back to and excuses to make about his leg, Worthy’s family is coming in the morning to pick him up, Hern has his own kids to get back to, Riley needs to finish her mission report, and they all have one last stop to make tomorrow before they all go their separate ways, thanks to Jack. The group stands up to say their goodbyes, and Mac finds himself pulled aside by half the Deltas. 

“Listen, Mac, you ever need to talk about anything, even if you just need to rant about Jack helicopter parenting you, we’re all here for you, okay?” Munoz puts a hand on Mac’s shoulder. “We’ve all been through some pretty rough stuff together, and we know that’s not something you just shake off. And I’m really glad you’ve had a guy like Jack there to help you through it, but just remember, we’re all your family now, kid.” 

Mac nods, swallowing hard and swiping across his eyes with his hand, suddenly emotional. Maybe it’s just the alcohol, or the emotional swings hitting again, but it doesn’t really matter, because he’s well aware these guys will be the last people to judge him for it. “I-I really appreciate that.” 

“You don’t have to open up till you’re good and ready, but when and if you want to, we’ll be here for you.” Lanier says. Mac lets the man put one arm around his shoulder and gently pull Mac into a massive bear hug. _ No wonder he’s so good with kids. _Mac wonders how many abandoned, abused kids just like him have found someone caring and understanding and genuinely kind in this man. 

“And if you or Jack ever need anything, you let us know,” Hern says. “God knows the man’s too stubborn to ask for help himself.” 

Mac chuckles. “Will do.” He looks around the room, at the new family he’s acquiring, and he can’t help but think that this is as good at things get. 

* * *

CODY’S INK

THERE ARE A LOT OF PEOPLE IN A SMALL BUILDING RIGHT NOW

“You didn’t all have to come,” Mac says. 

“Hey, Cody did all our ink back in the day,” Fitzy says. “Jack told us about him while we were still overseas, and when we finished our tour together we all came with him.” He rolls up his sleeve to show the fire-breathing dragon on his forearm, holding the Delta symbol in its claws. 

“We all got somethin’ different, but it was a way to commemorate what we went through together.” He grins. “He’s gonna want to see how well it all aged. Trust me.”

The door to the tiny office opens, and Cody walks out. Cody’s pretty much the same as Jack remembers him from the Dalton Christmas party two years ago. He has a tattoo that Jack thinks is new, a constellation swirling up his right arm onto the back of his hand, but other than that he’s just the same.

“Long time no see, Cuz,” he says, pulling Jack into a hug. 

“Same, man.” 

“Hey guys!” Cody grins. “I remember y’all. Not your names, but...let me see. Dragon,” he points to Fitzy’s arm, “Delta symbol and a Gemini for the twins,” he nods to Deacon, “You’ve got an eagle holding the triangle for yours,” he says to Munoz, before turning to Lanier, “I remember you, Big Boy, you’ve got just the Delta, on your calf.” He grins at Thorpe. “And yours was the biggest one. Delta in the midde of the back, and the wings coming from the sides of the triangle on both shoulder blades.” 

“You know, that was kind of a mistake on my part,” Thorpe chuckles. “I went and planned a whole big tat on skin I could still feel.” Anyone else might cringe, but Cody’s been around guys like this long enough that he knows Thorpe means the joke without a hint of bitterness. 

“Where else would you get it, man?” Deacon asks. “On your butt?”

“Oh, yeah. Can’t you just see me rocking a tramp stamp?” Thorpe asks with a chuckle. 

“And you’re Mac, right?” Cody asks. “The one who kept taking things apart at the house? I heard stories.”

Mac chuckles. “Yeah, that’s me.” He swallows, trying to force the words out before he loses his nerve. “I...uh...Jack said you’re good at covering scars, and...I was wondering…”

“Come on back,” Cody says, his voice the same kind of soft and disarming that Jack’s gets soemtimes. “I normally do scar consults in private, just because.”

“Can Jack…”

“Sure, if you want him there, that’s totally cool, man.” Cody opens the door that leads out of the tiny waiting room and into the actual tattoo parlor. “You’re the first of the day, so it’s all quiet back here.” Mac nods. Jack called to ask if they could come in early, since a lot of the Deltas have flights to catch this morning. “Okay, you wanna show me what we’re working with?”

Mac doesn’t like letting anyone see his scars. The ones on his neck are actually starting to fade with rigorous treatment and a lot of rubbing to smooth them down. They won’t disappear, but he might conceivably someday in the future be able to wear a collarless shirt again without feeling like he has to hide.

But the knife-carved cuts on his chest are another story. Murdoc intended for those to scar, and to do so viciously, so he interfered with every step of the healing process, doing whatever he could to make sure the cuts left permanent marks. _ Well, I’m just going to one-up him and leave a permanent mark of my own. _

Cody, to his credit, says nothing at all about the origin of the scar. Mac wonders how much awfulness he’s seen, that people have asked him to cover for them. _ This is a little more gruesome than some ink of your ex’s name, but it’s on the same concept. _ He glances around the small room and sees a folder labeled ‘trafficking cover ups, free’. On the front there’s an image of two photos of the back of someone’s neck, side by side. One is a barcode. The other is a sprawling, beautiful design of a wild rose. Mac swallows. _ He’s seen a lot more people than me who’ve been through hell and back. _

Cody’s fingers are gentle, running over the scar and probing softly, assessing the depth of it and how healed it currently is. 

“You’re gonna want to wait a couple years for that scar to heal properly,” Cody finally says, stepping back. “Otherwise there’s even more risk of the ink not taking properly.” 

“I told him that,” Jack says. “But that’s not what we’re here for today. I’ll bring him back in a couple years for that one. We’re just looking at what you could do with that in the future.”

“Well, kid, what were _ you _ thinking? Got any ideas on your mind?”

Mac pulls a paper out of his pocket and unfolds it shyly. “I was thinking...a Phoenix. With the tail in the ‘v’ of the M and the wings covering the two outside lines.” Jack’s impressed with the sketch. Mac’s an artist, in addition to all his other talents. _ I should have known. _

“Nice. I can totally work with this. I’ll leave this here in a file with your name, I do that for a lotta the guys who come in and want their scars done, because usually they come just like this, with fresh ones that need some time.” 

“Jack told me. But we’re actually here for something else.” Mac holds up a second paper. “I’m going to get this, on my left ankle.” Jack smiles, he saw Mac copying Riley’s wolf-head tattoo on _ her _ ankle. And then adding the Deltas insignia behind it. 

“And I’m getting this.” Jack holds up a paper of his own. Riley’s name in binary code, and a paperclip. “Put ‘em right over my heart, Cody.”


	7. Scavengers+Hard Drive+ Dragonfly

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ok...so this might be the past chapter I post for a couple weeks. Nanowrimo, editing my novel, and a new job (more hours is both awesome for homeowner (and future puppy owner) me and bad for author me) have combined to kick my butt the past week and a half. So, I probably won't be posting the next chapter until the beginning of December. I'm going to try to stay on track to have my Christmas special out on Christmas, but I might switch to a bi-weekly chapter posting in 2020, since I'm going to have less time to write and I'm hoping to finish polishing my original work...But rest assured I'm not giving up on this fic, it's my way of relaxing and not having to write with all the pressure that comes with preparing to publish something!

### 307-Scavengers+Hard Drive+Dragonfly

LOS ANGELES

MATTY ISN’T A PARTY PERSON

Matty’s alone, finally. She’s managed to slip past all the small talk and handshaking an insincere smiles, and found a balcony with a view of the city. It’s quiet and peaceful, but when the door opens behind her a few moments later, she wishes she’d accessorized with a gun instead of a necklace. _ Damn it. _

It’s the man she’s been avoiding all evening. Todd Steckler. He’s holding a glass of whiskey and looks more than a little harried. “Director Webber. There you are. Still not a fan of these things?”

_ As if you couldn’t tell from the fact that I clearly want to throw you off this balcony right now. _“Getting all dolled up to kiss the ring seems like a giant waste of time to me.” She used to enjoy showing up with Ethan, they’d joke about pompous diplomats and politicians and argue over the quality of the hors d’ourves compared to previous ops. Now, the room always feels emptier when she walks in. 

“Well, let me suggest that you never run for U.S. Senate. Sort of feels like that's ninety percent of what I do.” If he’s trying to be disarming with his jokes, it’s not going to work. 

“I'd rather be working. No offense.”

“None taken.” Steckler says wearily. “Truth is I only RSVP'd to this shindig to see you. I didn't think you would agree to meet with me any other way.”

“You're right. I wouldn't have. I told you, after everything, that I never wanted to see you again.” _ Todd Steckler is as responsible for what Ethan did as James MacGyver ever was. _ He was the one who greenlit the deep cover op, he was the one who sent Ethan in alone. _ And whatever they did to him, they twisted him into something I never even recognized. _ She knows it’s unfair to blame someone for an op gone wrong, but it’s hard to have perspective when it’s personal. 

“Wait, Matty. It’s about Ethan.” 

Matty flinches. “You’ve found him?”

“It’s a bit more complicated.” Steckler says, sounding rushed and frantic. “Yesterday I received a very disturbing e-mail. Whoever sent it is demanding $10,000, or they're gonna release photos of me with a woman.”

Matty doesn’t understand where this is going. _ It’s more confusing than one of Jack’s stories, and that’s saying something _. “Senator, I fail to see how you being hacked has any bearing on Ethan’s case whatsoever.”

“I wasn't hacked. Someone somehow got their hands on one of my old computers.” Steckler sighs. “Listen, it’s not the blackmail that concerns me. Linda knows about that affair; I came clean to her a year ago, and we’re working things out. But that same computer has another file that this blackmailer doesn't realize they have yet. It's a document cache from my time on the committee overseeing covert ops.” He swallows hard. “Dragonfly, Ethan’s file, was part of it.”

“And that concerns us why?” Matty says, the anger bubbling in her chest rising into her voice. “Ethan Reigns is a traitor who has a kill-on-sight order on him from three different agencies. Why we should worry about his file…”

Steckler cuts her off. “Ethan Reigns went into S-Company under deep cover. So deep that only I and his personal handler knew that he hadn’t genuinely changed sides.” 

“So all this time...he’s been working with us?” Matty feels like her blood is turning to ice in her veins. _ He was deep cover. He faked turning on his team so that he could get an in with a dangerous terrorist organization, and all these years I believed it. _

Guilt crashes over her in an icy wave. _ I should have known better. I should have trusted him, that he was better than that. And I should never have taken my anger at James MacGyver for what happened out on his son. _ That’s a regret she lives with on a consistent basis. _ I thought if he could make Ethan, the most conscientous person I knew, turn traitor, he could easily have turned his son into a monster too. _But the fact that the entire reason she originally hated James (up until he started mainpulating his own son, used Mac to try and commit murder, and then abandoned him for dead a month ago) is unfounded, makes her feel sick. Or like she really does need one of those drinks she waved away inside. 

“Yes. But after his handler was killed, he went dark. The only indication we have that he’s still cooperating are random intelligence dumps that are left on hard drives at the Sicilian offices.” Steckler looks Matty squarely in the eyes. “Dragonfly is the only copy of the evidence that can prove Ethan Reigns is not a traitor. If it remains missing, he can never come home.”

“And if it falls into the wrong hands, he’ll die.” 

* * *

THE WAR ROOM

RILEY ISN’T SURE WHY THEY’RE HERE

Riley knows when Matty is taking a case personally, and this is definitely one of those days. But there’s something else behind her eyes as well, something Riley hasn’t seen since she was a new recruit. She can’t identify it. On anyone else, though, she’d call it heartbreak. 

None of that offers any explanation for this op, though. 

“Meet Senator Todd Steckler from Ohio.” Matty motions to a picture on the screen. “Two years ago, one of his aides wiped his office computer and brought it to a recycling center. But instead of it being recycled, it was illegally shipped overseas to Ghana.”

Jack frowns. “Why would somebody's old computer be sent all the way to Ghana?” 

Riley answers first. “Because it's more expensive to recycle electronic waste here than to export it to a developing country where it gets dumped in a landfill and forgotten.”

Matt nods. “Sadly, that’s correct. Some of the most reputable recycling services do this under the radar.”

“I don't know how many computers I've thrown out in my life,” Bozer says. “You're telling me there's a chance they're rotting in one of those landfills?”

“Unfortunately, a very good chance,” Riley says. “Almost fifty million tons every year of junked TVs, computers and cell phones end up there.” She did a report on it in high school. That feels like a lifetime ago. 

“All right, so what happened to the senator's computer once it got to Ghana?” Mac asks. He’s fidgeting a lot today, rocking back and forth on his chair and tapping his feet constantly. Riley wonders if he’s picking up on Matty’s agitation. 

“All we know is that once the computer was shipped overseas, it fell into the hands of an extortionist, who, thirty-six hours ago, sent this e-mail.”

“Um Matty, that's an e-mail threatening to expose Steckler for cheating on his wife,” Riley says. _ Why does this have Matty so riled up? Unless she’s the other woman. Which I just can’t see. _ Steckler doesn’t really seem like Matty’s type. 

“That's correct.” Matty doesn’t so much as bat an eyelash.

“I'll take this one, Ri,” Jack says. “I think what she's trying to say is, what is Senator Scumbag's personal trash doing in the Phoenix's lap?” 

Matty frowns. “Because those photos aren't the only sensitive material on that computer. There is also a file called Dragonfly. It is this file that I need retrieved before the extortionist stumbles onto it.” Riley frowns. _ Combined with the name Steckler, Dragonfly sounds familiar. _ She ran across something like that in her early CIA days, when she almost got kicked out for illegally hacking her own agency. But she can’t remember what Dragonfly was. 

“And there it is. Okay, that makes more sense. What is this Dragonfly, exactly?” Jack asks. 

Matty visibly shuts down. “That information is need to know. Now, the four of you need to hurry, or you will miss your flight. There's a car waiting to take you to LAX.”

Jack chuckles, sounding confused. “Matty, you just said LAX. We don't usually fly out of there.”

“Today you do. You're flying commercial.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, now. Come on, let's-” 

Matty cuts Jack off with a glare. “I'm sorry, but what part of "hurry or you'll miss your flight" did you not understand? Go.”

Riley moves toward the door, Mac and Bozer following her. Mac looks less than ecstatic about the process of showing his passport (they have to fly commercial with his real one, because his face is a little too recognizable to any TSA employees who’ve been around for a while). _ It’s always the inevitable questions about the terrorism charges, and he has to prove all over again that they were dropped and his name’s been cleared. _ But he looks back at Matty a couple times, and there’s even more agitation in his eyes. 

Jack seems as unhappy about the prospect of getting Mac through airport security as Riley. “Matty, we don't - we don't fly commercial.”

“Jack. Please.” Riley’s never heard Matty’s voice break like this. Matty is pleading, practically begging. _ This is wrong. On so many levels, this is wrong. _

Jack clearly notices, and his whole demeanor changes from confrontational to conciliatory. “Okay, yes, ma'am, yeah, yeah, we'll handle it. I gotcha. We'll handle it.”

Jack follows the others out into the hall, closing the door behind him. They walk toward the door, and only once they’re out of earshot of the room does anyone say anything. 

“Uh, that was weird,” Bozer says. 

“Yeah, very.” Riley nods. She’s still trying to process what just happened. None of this is normal. 

“Any idea what this is about?” Mac asks, but that seems to be directed at Jack instead of Riley. “Is it something from your past?”

“No, but I've never seen her like this before,” Jack says quietly. 

“Really? What do you mean, Jack?” Bozer asks. 

“She's scared.”

* * *

ACCRA, GHANA

IT’S REALLY HOT

Mac rolls his wrist over, looking at the cuff on it, for about the hundredth time. Jack grins. _ Saw Riley wearing something like this a while back, thought it might work since he doesn’t like the dogtags on his neck anymore. _One of the tags is fastened on the front of the leather cuff. Jack has the other back in his own pocket, at Mac’s insistence. Jack can feel it pressed against his leg, and even the edge of the metal biting his skin is oddly reassuring. A reminder that he has Mac back now, and things are...maybe not the way they should be, but getting there. 

Mac fiddles with the car’s AC system. Jack figures it’s more to keep his hands busy than anything else; he certainly doesn’t care how hot it is in the van. The kid keeps his house at at least seventy-five degrees all the time now when he’s home, and he can’t seem to handle the air conditioning in Phoenix anymore. After the way Murdoc treated him, Jack can’t blame him. And anyway, Mac’s still too thin, he’s bound to get colder than someone at a healthy weight. 

Jack figures distracting the kid before he completely pulls the dashboard out of the van and starts disassembling it is a good idea. “You know, maybe Dragonfly is a-a secret FBI document revealing that Tupac's alive and well and living in the Caymans.”

“Or it's a series of photos shows who really shot JFK,” Bozer suggests.

“Ooh, that's good. Or maybe proof that Stonehenge was built by ancient aliens. What do you think of that?” That one at least gets Mac to crack a grin. 

“Maybe it's evidence that an asteroid is two years from colliding with Earth, and the government is staying mum to avoid a massive public panic,” Bozer says enthusiastically. 

“I love how fired up you get. Passion!”

Jack glances into the back. “Riley? You’re strangely not eager to weigh in on the whole Dragonfly debate. Which is weird. You and Billy have an argument or something, and you’re wallowing in angst back there?”

“No, Jack, Billy and I are fine. It’s just...As must as I'm enjoying these theories, I think if Matty wanted us to know what Dragonfly was, she would have told us herself.”

“Wait. Riley Davis is telling _ me _ not to go digging? Okay, I revise my claims. That file is proof that body snatchers are real, cause whatever you are, you’re not Riley.” 

“I just...Jack, what if it’s something we’re all better off not knowing?” She glances pointedly at Mac, and Jack swallows what he was about to say. _ It could be about James, or Murdoc. Or something to do with how Mac’s mom died, for all I know. _ He glances at Mac, who’s returned to fiddling with the AC, and sighs. _ She’s probably right. When Matty keeps secrets, she keeps them for a good reason. _

Riley seems as eager to change the subject as he is. “Jack, pull over right here. That's the bank the senator's fake extortion payment was routed to.” Matty set up a money transfer that would make it look like the senator paid off the blackmailer. 

Jack still doesn’t get what Matty’s ties to this guy are. He can’t imagine that they’re friends, but she clearly has some connection to him. Dragonfly sounds personal. 

_ I feel like I used to see the name Steckler on some ops committees, back in the day. _Around the time he and Riley were paired off. Maybe they managed some ops together. Maybe Dragonfly is a skeleton in Matty’s closet. Jack’s not fool enough to think the woman could have been an agent this long without spearheading a few operations that went south. She’s got blood on her hands, like any of the rest of them. 

Maybe that’s what this is about. There are missions and ops Jack doesn’t talk about, from the Deltas, the army, the CIA, that he knows should never see the light of day. _ People don’t understand what it’s like to have to make executive decisions. All they see is the collateral damage, the bodies left in the wake, and they want someone to blame. _ There are things Jack wishes he could relive, wishes he could do differently, but the choices he made are the ones he has to live with. 

“We got thirty minutes till the bank opens,” Mac says. 

“Okay. We got some time, now, before this extortionist shows up, so who's on snacks?” Jack asks. He whips out his seat cushion and starts airing it up. Mostly just to annoy everyone at this point. 

It works on Bozer at least. “Aw, great. Stakeout pillow,” he grumbles. “Jack, please tell me you left the Willie Nelson CDs at home.”

“Oh. Now, see, you reminded me, Bozer.” Jack opens a CD case, a new one after his last set of Willie Nelson got trashed in the van in Amsterdam. He grins. Half of these are CDs Riley put together and burned for him with one of her computers. The other half are ones Mac’s gotten for him over the past couple years. _ Every once in a while I just find a new one in my locker. _

He slides in one of Riley’s CDs, the concert mix, mostly because he knows that’s the one that bothers Bozer the most, and leans back with a smile while Riley hops out of the van to go get them snacks.

* * *

Mac twists a paperclip into the shape of a dragonfly and stares out the van window. Jack’s offered him some kind of spicy meat jerky at least five times now, but Mac doesn’t think he can stomach anything at the moment. 

The truth is, he’s probably more worried about what Dragonfly is than any of them. Matty kept looking at _ him _ with sad eyes the whole time she was talking. He’s afraid it’s something more to do with James. He can’t imagine how things could get worse, but he’s sure they can. _ I thought that about Murdoc too. _ Dragonfly clearly was lost a while ago, so it can’t _ be _ something to do with Murdoc or what he’s done to their team, but then again, it could still be something connected to him in some way. All Mac knows is that it can’t be good. And for some reason, it’s got something to do, at least in Matty’s eyes, with him. 

Suddenly, Riley’s rig pings, and she sits up straighter. “Someone just withdrew the ten grand. Right there.” Her voice is muffled by mumbling around whatever candy she bought for herself. “Blue hoodie. Backpack.” She holds up the screen so they can all see their target. 

“Y'all follow him on foot,” Jack says. “I'll stay here with the van in case we need a quick getaway.”

Mac, Riley, and Bozer climb out of the van. Mac’s pretty sure the AC wasn’t working properly in it anyway, but the heat from the street outside is still a slap in the face. He looks up at the bank, then watches as the doors open and the figure walks out. Whoever they are, they’re shorter than he expected.

“That's him,” Riley says. “Nice and easy.” They step onto the sidewalk a decent distance behind their target, following the figure for several blocks. Suddenly, the hooded person stops short, standing absolutely still as people walk past, jostling them. Mac slows as well, wondering if this is like a car chase and it’s the better part of wisdom for most or all of them to walk past and pretend they don’t care that the other person stopped or changed direction. 

“Why are they stopping?” Bozer asks. 

Riley whispers. “The mirror. He made us. Go!” The figure breaks into a run. Mac sees Riley take a shortcut to try and head them off, and he turns down the next alley, hoping to do something similar. Bozer’s the distance runner, and he can only hope those years of high school track are going to pay off. 

Mac pushes his way through the narrow alley, glancing momentarily at a pile of trash before deciding there’s nothing in it that will improve their chances of catching the blackmailer. He bursts out of the end of the alley, only to see the person they’re chasing dash past, Bozer hot on his heels. Mac takes off running again, and for a moment it looks like they’re going to be able to catch this person, as Riley darts out of the next alley ahead of them. Cornered, their target stumbles to a stop, and half turns. Bozer catches up, grabbing for the hoodie.

“Got you now!” Unfortunately, he’s spoken a little too soon and the person pulls free of his grip, dives through the narrow gap between a chain link fence and a wall, and heads down that alley. 

“Damn! Who we chasing? Houdini?” Bozer pants. Mac doesn’t pause long enough to respond. 

Mac flings himself over the fence. It’s been a long time since he’s really used his parkour skills from his vigilante days, but a lot of the more common ones, like getting over tall fences, are all muscle memory. He can do them in the dark, with a concussion, or a bullet wound, or broken bones. It’s a survival skill. 

He can see the person ahead of them, jumping for a fire escape ladder. They catch hold of the rungs, but Mac’s too close, and he catches hold of the person’s legs and pulls them down, and Bozer rushes up to help him; apparently he and Riley made their way over the fence as well. The hood of the sweatshirt falls back as the person continues to struggle, and Mac gets his first good look at the startled face staring up at him.

“Hey, she's just a kid,” Bozer says. “How old are you?” 

“Sixteen,” The girl hisses, and then lunges at their grip on her. Mac’s not sure he believes her. Then again, people keep carding him for alcohol any time he buys beer for the team’s get-togethers, so he’s not in any position to wonder if someone looks their age. 

Bozer gasps when one of the girl’s shoes collides with his shin. 

“Stop kicking me, you little psychopath! That hurt!” 

“Then let me go!” The girl shouts, and Mac can hear some of the panic bleeding through. He tries not to think about how much he must be scaring her right now, because he _ knows _ how scared he was every time someone ever caught him. _ What does she think we’re going to do to her? _ For all this girl knows, they could be traffickers kidnapping her. 

“I promise, we’re not traffickers or anything. We want to talk, that’s all,” Mac says. _ Not that that would actually have reassured me much if I was in her shoes, but still. _ It hurts to think that maybe someone could think he’s capable of doing that. 

“But letting you go is not gonna happen,” Riley says. She at least is standing a safe distance from the flailing feet and hands. Mac grimaces as an elbow jabs into his stomach. 

“I didn't do anything to you!” The girl shouts. 

“That's true, but we were monitoring the ten grand you just withdrew. You've been caught blackmailing a U.S. senator,” Bozer says. 

Riley nods. “Yeah, and a crime like that carries a sentence of at least a decade in prison. But we'll let you off with a warning if you tell us where his computer is.” She reaches down to the girl’s discarded backpack and pulls out a battered silver laptop. 

“Hey! Don't touch that!” The girl shouts. Riley ignores her, opening up the computer and taking a look at it. Even from where he’s standing, and being jostled around trying to keep this kid still, Mac can see that it’s been opened up and pieces are moved around. _ It looks like some when I’m done with them, except that this one probably works. _

Riley looks impressed. “This model's, like, seven years old, but I'm seeing hardware from other machines added to it to boost performance. Did you build this?”

“No. Custom-built rigs modded like that are sold on every corner in Accra.” Mac can hear the sarcasm dripping from her voice. _ She picked the wrong person to start a battle of sass with. _Mac knows Riley can go head to head with even Jack, if she wants to. 

Riley closes the computer again with a smile. “Computers are kind of my thing, too. Got to admit, this is pretty legit.” She slips the computer back in the girl’s backpack and walks over. “You seem smart, so I don't blame you for not talking. My friends and I, we don't care about the blackmail. You give us the computer we want, we'll let you walk away.”

The girl stops struggling, just a little. “How do I know I can trust you?”

Bozer shakes his head. “Huh? Trust us? You really are crazy. We're not the ones extorting people.”

Riley just smiles. “I know you don't care about trusting us. You're playing scared so we sweeten the deal, right?” The girl looks like she’s been found out. She lowers her head and Riley nods. “That’s what I thought. Let's bottom-line it, then. You give us the location of the senator's computer, and we’ll let you keep the cash.” 

The girl shrugs, shaking Bozer and Mac’s hands off her. “I know where the hard drive is being kept, but I don't know how to get to it. Joseph keeps them locked up, and he's got the only key.”

Mac glances at her. “We're not worried about a locked door, but who's Joseph?”

“The man we work for.”

“We?” Bozer asks.

Riley hands the girl back her backpack. “Ten grand for a tour of your office. What’s your name, by the way?”

“Abina.”

* * *

E-WASTE LANDFILL

WHERE COMPUTERS GO TO DIE

Riley’s seen more than one place like this in her life. At least it smells better than that dump in Guatemala where she had to go undercover as a trash picker a few years ago. This one isn’t full of rotting food and other disgusting things. Just a lot of old computers. And all the toxins that leach out of the components. She’s not sure which is worse.

Riley felt sick the first time she realized there are people who _ live _ off the scraps they find in the piles of trash. That that’s where they find food, clothing, where they build shacks from the things they can scrounge. She’ll never forget the starving children with dirty faces, the women with sores on their skin and hopelessness in their eyes, the families living in holes in the mounds of garbage because they had nowhere else to go.

Here, it’s a little different, but not much. The people climbing through the heaps of trash are checking phone and tablet screens for cracks instead of discarded food for whether it’s edible, but there’s the same air of desperation and poverty. Most of the people here can’t be older than twelve. Riley wonders if this is how they try to support their families, and if many kids don’t survive too long doing it. _ There’s a lot that can go wrong working with stuff like this. _It’s not like she didn’t dumpster-dive to make her first custom computer, but she knows it was risky, and there’s a lot of nasty things in technology that shouldn't actually be touched or inhaled. 

“When you said you were taking us to an E-waste junkyard, I don't know what I was imagining, but it wasn't this,” Bozer says. “So, what are all these kids doing?” 

Mac answers before Riley can. “They're, uh, breaking down electronic scrap into something that they can resell, like gold, plastic, copper.” Riley flinches, remembering he spent some time trying to survive on the street himself. He doesn’t remember a lot of what happened between the time he found James up until the team rescued him from Murdoc, but he did tell them a little after one of his nightmares, a few vague things about being hungry and sick and scared of some of the other people wandering the streets. Riley’s heart twists. Mac shouldn’t have had to suffer like that. None of these kids should have to either. 

“Uh, we call them "scavengers," 'cause their job is to search the landfill for anything that can be sold in town,” Abina says. “Uh, circuit boards, cameras, batteries, monitors, keyboards.”

“What do computer fans go for?” Bozer asks, watching a short, thin boy wheel an entire wheelbarrow of them past. 

“Uh, 19 cents a pound. But LCD screens are the real prize. Those go for 60 cents each. 80 if they're not cracked. Those always go quick at the beginning of the day. Most kids sleep here so that they can get in first, and get to the best stuffs.” 

Jack makes a sound somewhere between strangled sigh and angry growl, and Mac shivers. Riley vividly remembers how terrifying it was sleeping in her own little shack in that dump. _ And I’m a trained agent who could have defended myself if someone attacked me. These kids...they’re just kids. _

Riley hears a banging sound, and turns to look, just as Abina rushes off toward it. She grabs the hammer out of the hand of a boy probably a couple years younger than her. 

“Danso, what did I tell you about cracking those printer cartridges open? They're full of poison.”

Mac nods, then glances at a box of something, and Riley sees his eyes light up the way they do when he has an idea. “Mind if I show you another way?” He snaps the phone apart, and Riley sees Jack grimace. “Cellular PCB boards are made from epoxy resin, which makes them incredibly strong, so you can use one of these as a lever to pry this casing open without throwing toxic ink in the air.” He demonstrates, and Danso’s grin widens.

“Thank you. Are you a scavenger too?”

“Something like that,” Mac says. 

“You really like breaking phones, don’t you?” Jack asks.

“Hey, be glad this one wasn’t yours.” 

Jack nods, still half-grinning. “You know, maybe I'm missing something here, but how is it even possible to blackmail the senator if everything that gets sent here is broken down for scrap metal?” 

“Well, because not everything is broken down,” Abina says with a grin. “Follow me. There's more.” She leads the way into a large sheet-metal building, where something that looks like the makeshift version of Phoenix command is operating. Riley glances around at the teenagers working on all shapes and sizes of computer monitors. 

Abina smiles proudly. “Hard drives are pulled from computers and brought here where they can be scanned for pictures, e-mails, videos, anything that can be used to blackmail their previous owners.”

“You guys built a sophisticated data-mining operation entirely out of other peoples' junk,” Riley mumbles, looking around. _ This is on par with anything I’ve ever seen. _ She remembers how long it took her to learn to build her own custom computer from scrap. _ This is incredible. _“So you're scraping through text messages and e-mails, using keywords looking for proof of behavior that can be blackmailed, but how did you find explicit photos?” 

“I wrote a script that looks for color values, matching skin tones,” Abina says with a grin.

“I'm not saying _ any _ of this is okay, but, damn.” Riley is impressed. And it’s hard to impress her when it comes to tech. 

Abina points to a wire mesh cage in the middle of the room and lowers her voice. “This is where Joseph locks the hard drives that have data on them. But like I said, he has the only key.” Mac glances at the lock, grins, and starts rummaging through a box of junk sitting near the door. 

“Ah, don't worry about that,” Jack says. “When it comes to locked doors, my boy Mac, here? He's undefeated.”

“So, after we have the hard drive, we're all in agreement, we're definitely taking a peek at Dragonfly. Right?” Bozer asks. Riley just shakes her head.

“Nah. Matty would know we looked,” Jack says. Riley can sense the same reluctance in his voice as she feels. _ He knows that whatever it is is serious. _

“Not if we get Riley to help,” Bozer says. 

“What makes you assume I'd want to help?” Riley asks. Bozer frowns. “Listen, Matty’s looked out for us. Always. I don’t think she’d keep a secret from us unless she thought it would hurt us more. Do you?”

Bozer’s about to reply when his phone buzzes and he pulls it out, a stricken look crossing his face. “It's Matty. Why is she calling me? She never calls me. You think she knows I was just talking about her?” 

“Yeah, probably,” Jack says, deadpan.

Bozer answers the phone hesitantly. “H-hey, Matty. How are you?” 

Riley can hear Matty’s voice even though the phone isn’t on speaker. “In need of a status update, Bozer. Do you have the senator's drive?” Riley glances at where Mac appears to be tearing apart a power toothbrush. 

“Uh your timing is terrifying, as ever. Uh, yes, we are seconds away from having the hard drive in hand.”

“Good. The moment you confirm Dragonfly is on that drive, I want you on your way to the airport.”

“Copy that,” Bozer says.

The next second, Riley hears a strange whistling noise begin outside, and it’s quickly taken up by the kids at the computer screens. Mac stops working the end of the toothbrush into the lock and looks up.

“What's going on?” He asks. 

“Joseph is here,” Abina says, a stricken look crossing her face. 

“Bozer?” Matty asks from the phone. 

“Uh...Call you back, Matty.”

“He wasn't supposed to come today,” Abina says, her eyes wide. “You have to hide.”

Jack shakes his head, his eyes smoldering, his gun in hand. “Hide? I hate to break it to you, kiddo, but Jack Dalton doesn't hide from anybody, especially not dudes named Joseph.” Riley can tell he’s pissed that anyone’s profiting off these kids and forcing them to do illegal and dangerous things. _ He doesn’t think about anything other than making someone pay, not when he’s this mad. _

“Please. You have to,” Abina pleads, and Riley sees Jack soften instantly at the fear and desperation in her wide brown eyes. “If he finds out I brought you here-”

“Just tell us where, kiddo,” Jack says. 

Abina leads them over to a shipping container and pulls aside a ragged blanket stretched across the opening. Riley ducks inside, covering her nose for a moment. The smell of unwashed bodies is almost overwhelming. She hears Bozer stifle a sneeze. 

“Shh,” Mac says, and Bozer gives him a disgruntled look. 

Riley shudders. This is all too familiar to her. And from the looks of the shiver going down Mac’s spine as well, it’s bringing back a few memories he’d rather not have had. 

“What, these kids sleep in _ here _?” Bozer asks.

Jack just nods. Riley glances around the room, taking in the rough quality printed photos on the walls. They’re almost all landscapes, some views of cities as well. _ I wonder whose space this is. _

She stands beside Jack, watching through a small hole cut in the metal, as two SUVs pull into the building. They screech to a stop, and several men step out. Riley can already tell which one is Joseph. He’s dressed like every small-time crook who wants to look like a big fish. A horrible color suit, far too much gold, and sunglasses that make him look like a movie villain. She shakes her head. _ He’s trying too hard. _ The truly dangerous and terrifying people are the ones who could dress in a t-shirt and jeans and still send a shiver down her spine. People like James or Murdoc. 

“Welcome, sir,” Abina says, and it seems wrong to see her look so cowed.

“I trust all is here,” Joseph says, walking to the cage and unlocking it. 

“Oh, come on, Mac. We got to do something,” Bozer says. He’s watching as the kids at the computers cower away in fear as some of Joseph’s men walk along the rows, inspecting their work. One boy, whose stack of hard drives to scan is a little taller than the others, shrieks as the impassive-faced goon pulls him from his chair and drives a fist into his stomach. Riley clenches her own fist in helpless anger. 

Mac shakes his head, and Riley thinks she can see tears in his eyes. “Anything we do impulsively here could make their lives a lot worse.”

“Worse than this?” Jack asks. “Mac, I could take ‘em. These guys ain’t no match for Jack Dalton.”

“There’s too many, and they’d use the kids as human shields,” Mac argues in a whisper. Riley knows Jack knows that already. He’s just pissed and looking for a fight. 

Bozer turns to look at where Joseph is piling hard drives into a couple bags. “Abina said the senator's drive was somewhere in that stack. Mac, we can't just let 'em take it.”

“We're not gonna make a move here and endanger these kids' lives,” Mac insists. Riley can see two tears tracing down his cheeks as the boy who was being punished for being too slow is finally thrown to the ground. The man who was beating him walks away, and climbs into one of the vehicles. The others do the same, and the cars start. 

“Get back to work!” Joseph shouts, climbing into his own vehicle, and the cars pull out of the building. Only then do the children move toward their fallen friend, pulling him to his feet. One girl wipes blood from his cheek with the hem of her shirt. 

“We got to get to the van,” Bozer says. “If we lose Joseph, we lose the hard drive.”

“Yeah, hold on now,” Jack says. “That road we took in here was wide open. They'll spot us immediately if we try to follow 'em, especially in that soccer mom van.”

“So what do we do? Just let the reason we came here speed away?” Riley asks. She’s itching for a fight. _ Let them see us. Let them try and stop us. _ She wants to leave Joseph as bloody and broken as he left these children. “Abina, do you know where he's taking that hard drive?” She asks. 

“Yes. His house.”

“Can you take us there?” Mac asks. 

“I can, but it will cost you.”

* * *

JOSEPH'S HOUSE

HOUSE IS NOT REALLY AN ACCURATE DESCRIPTION

“Abina, for future reference, that is not a house,” Riley says. “_ That _ is a fortress.” Mac stares out the van window at the massive house, fenced in and patrolled by guards. It’s such a contrast to the dump and the shabby little ‘bedroom’ he and the others were hiding in only a few minutes ago. _ Joseph and people like him don’t care who they hurt, they just want to get to the top of the food chain, or at least pretend that’s where they are. _ This kind of ownership of status symbols like a big house is far too similar to what he’s seen in cartel men. _ It’s usually the guys somewhere in the middle, who want to act like they have real power. _ He wonders who, if anyone, Joseph answers to. _ It might be no one. But it might be someone who could figure out what Dragonfly was, and how important it is. _

“Yeah, a fortress paid for by poor people and the sweat of little kids,” Jack says. 

“Agreed,” Bozer mutters. “So how are we gonna get past all of that and get inside? Mac?” 

“I don't know!” Mac says sharply, then regrets it. _ I’m getting better at not getting angry so often, but today is not a good day. _

He takes a deep breath. “Sorry. I don’t have a plan...yet.”

And then Jack’s phone rings. He fishes it out and frowns. 

“Hey Matty, yeah, we hit a bit of a snag.” Mac tunes out Jack’s rambling explanation and focuses on the house, the grounds, and the fence. _ This is gonna be tough. _The fence is electrified which isn’t an insurmountable obstacle, but there are guard towers that remind him a little too much of being in prison. There’s no point at which there’s an unwatched space.

He’s dragged back to the conversation when Matty’s voice gets louder. “Okay, so let me get this straight. You were just one picked lock away from retrieving that drive, but backed off? And now, it's being kept inside a compound guarded by four lookout towers and a small army?”

“Yeah. That pretty much sums it up, but Matty, relax. We're gonna get your little file back, okay? Don't worry. It's just gonna be a little bit tougher than we originally anticipated.”

“Oh. That's really great to hear, Jack. Now tell me how?” 

Jack frowns, then tosses the phone to Mac. “Okay. Here. Why don't you take that one?” 

Mac rolls his eyes. “Thanks. Still ironing out the details, but look, I know I can make it over the fence. It's the lookout towers that are another story. They have sight lines in every direction.”

“I can move the guards for you,” Abina says. “But only if you do something for me.”

“Uh, sorry, kid, okay? No more moola. You already cleaned us out,” Jack says.

“It's okay. I don't want money. If I do this, I want to come home with you.” Mac sucks in a shaky breath. _ I guess I should have expected that. _And now...and now he’s going to feel guilty if they can’t pull this off.

“Give me that thing,” Jack says, taking the phone back. “Did you, uh? Did you hear that, Matty?”

“Yes, Jack, I did, and while I feel terrible for this young girl, I can't just pull a random civilian out of her home country! 

“Yeah. I'm not saying…” 

“A country I can't even acknowledge that my agents are currently in.” Matty sighs. “I want to, Jack, but I don’t have authorization.”

“Hey, I understand…” Jack says, and then Riley walks up and practically rips the phone out of his hand.

“Hey, Matty, listen, Abina's the key to accomplishing our objective. Without her help, we might as well just leave right now, empty-handed. So exactly how bad do you want whatever's on that drive?” It’s rare that Mac sees Riley this upset. _ She’s gotten attached. _ He can’t blame her. Abina’s like a miniature version of her. _ It would be like meeting Val here and knowing I had to leave her in that terrible place, struggling to survive. _

“Tell the young lady she has my word I will do everything I can to get her somewhere safe. But that will have to be good enough for now.”

“Thank you, Matty,” Riley says, hanging up. “Wheels are in motion to bring you home with us. So what's your plan for getting past the lookouts?”

Abina grins and pulls a cobbled-together smartphone from her pocket. She dials a number, then leans forward, ducking low over the phone and lowering her voice when someone answers. 

“Joseph. It's Abina. You have to come quick. The Sakawa Boys are raiding the landfill again. You have to hurry. They're taking everything.” She hangs up and grins. “That should do it.”

Mac watches, grinning, as the men pile into cars and the gate opens. As soon as the edges of the gate disappear into the trees, he slips up and jams a bent set of sticks into them, that will hopefully keep the gate from closing completely. _ Why deal with the electric fence when we can avoid it altogether? _

After the cars pull away in a swirl of dust, and the gate catches on Mac’s makeshift prop, he, Jack, and Bozer slip inside. 

“This place is freaking huge, man,” Jack says. “What do you say we divide and conquer? Yeah? Before old Joe-Joe realizes he's being duped.”

Mac nods. “Bozer and I will take the main house, you take the back.”

“Signal if you find the drive,” Bozer says. 

Mac opens the front door lock with his makeshift toothbrush lock pick, and pushes it open. There could still be men inside, Joseph could have left a few to guard the place. But the house sounds empty.

“Hey, Boze, how serious were you about checking Dragonfly behind Matty's back?” He whispers as they start opening doors and searching rooms. 

“I don’t know, Mac. It’s just...Matty doesn’t keep secrets from us.”

“Exactly. So whatever this is, she thinks we’re better off not knowing.” 

“Maybe, but whatever's on that drive, Matty just agreed to airlift Abina out of Ghana to ensure she got it back.” Bozer sighs. “And Mac, don’t tell me you didn’t notice she was looking at you the whole time in the briefing.”

Mac runs a hand through his sweaty hair. He’s been trying to forget that little detail. _ In some way, Dragonfly is connected to me. _ He can’t deny that some part of him _ desperately _ wants to know what it is. But he also can’t shake the worry that knowing might only make everything worse. _ Matty kept my father’s real identity a secret at first because she thought it would protect me. _ And knowing who James really was...well, he knows how that ended. _ And even though the security team has reinforced his cell and countered every escape method I saw, there have to be more. _ He wonders if Dragonfly has anything to do with James’s future plans. _ If it does, maybe I need to know what’s on it. _

He shakes his head. _ I have to trust my team. _ No more one man showdowns with his past, that earned him nothing but pain and misery. He already knows if there’s something on Dragonfly about James that he’s going to want to deal with it himself. _ Better not to have it in my head at all. _

* * *

Riley leans on the hood of their van, watching on sat view as the team infiltrates the compound. Abina is watching over her shoulder, and part of Riley wants to just hand the girl her rig, consequences be damned. 

“I found embarrassing photos on hundreds of computers before, but no one has ever showed up to get them back. So what else is on that drive?” 

“Honestly all we know is it's really important to our boss.”

“So you're risking your lives for your boss and you don't even know why? She must be a good woman.”

“She is. Don't worry. If my boss says she'll do anything to get you out of Ghana, she means it.” Riley sighs, remembering her own first meeting with Matty. _ I was sure I was going to prison. And then she showed up and offered me an alternative. An alternative I wasn’t sure I wanted, but it was at least freedom, and the chance to make a move that people would really listen to. _ She almost laughs. Eighteen year old Riley was a rebellious kid with a chip on her shoulder, a problem with authority, and some budding anarchist sentiments. _ Thought getting myself welcomed into the belly of the beast would be a good way to get some inside information. What I didn’t count on was finding a family with the people I’d always believed I couldn’t trust. _

“When I was young and working as a scavenger, I always used to wonder where the electronics came from. And then Joseph made me start searching hard drives, and I saw the photos. And the more I saw, the more I dreamed of living one of those lives.” Abina smiles, her face wistful. 

“Well, what'd you see yourself doing?” Riley asks. 

“Majoring in computer science. At a university in Boston or California. I'd live in a dorm with my friends, take classes, go to parties.” Riley chuckles. “Your boss will let me do that?”

“Yeah. Sure. You can do anything you want, as long as you use your skills to help people, not harm them. It's gonna feel a lot better, Abina. Trust me.”

“What did you do?” Abina asks. Riley guesses she should have expected that question to be coming. Bonding goes both ways.

“Well, I was a hacker. I found a lot of secrets people didn’t want the world to know, kind of like you do, and I shared them. I thought I was doing the right thing.” _ And maybe it was, sometimes. But maybe, sometimes, there was a better way. _ “I was good at it. Really good. But then I got too cocky, and I hacked the National Security Agency on a dare from a couple other seniors. We were all about to graduate and we felt like we were ready to take the world by storm. And two days later, a bunch of men in suits showed up at my graduation and hauled me out.” She grimaces. 

“The police took you?”

“Sort of. They weren’t just police, though. They took me to this building I wasn’t allowed to see, and put me in a little room. And then Matty, my boss now, walked in.” Riley smiles fondly at the memory. “I didn’t think there was any way she was an agent, but she walked up and sat down in front of me and said she understood me. Said she knew what it felt like to think the world dealt you a bad hand, and to want to make it pay. And she said she’d found a better way to beat it at its own game.” 

“So you went to work for her.” 

“More or less. And eventually I met Jack, and we became as close to family as there is.” She grins. “And then Mac came along, and he turned everything upside down, but in the best way.”

“He’s like a little brother to you.” Abina says. 

“Yeah. Sort of like you and Danso. You want to protect him from anything bad that could ever happen.” Riley swallows, remembering last summer. When she felt absolutely helpless, knowing Murdoc had Mac and there was nothing any of them could do. When she practically lived in the War Room, scanning every sat feed they had trying to find some trace, some way to track Mac down and get him back where he belonged. 

The thought reminds her that she’s supposed to be the team’s eye in the sky. She turns back to her rig, just in time to see a car pull into the driveway._ Oh no. _

* * *

JOSEPH’S HOUSE

THERE ARE A LOT OF ROOMS IN HERE

Mac’s working his makeshift lock pick into yet another doorknob. This one is particularly stubborn, and he wonders if it’s reinforced because this is where Joseph keeps the most valuable items like the hard drives. 

He flinches at the sound of footsteps. _ There was still someone in the house. _

“Hey! What are you two doing?” Mac glances up, the guy glaring at them is the same one who beat up the kid in the warehouse earlier. _ This is bad. _

And then Bozer swings a fist, and the man stumbles backward a step. He grabs his jaw, and then glares at Bozer. “Really?” Boze groans, and then headbutts the guy in the stomach, taking him off his feet. Mac tries to move in to help, but one of the man’s flailing legs catches his ankle and sends him sprawling. 

“Don't you…” Bozer grunts, and Mac sees the man’s hands reaching for the radio that must have been knocked off his belt. Mac scrambles to his feet, intending to kick the radio away, but it’s too late.

“Intruder! Intruder in the house!” The man shouts, before Mac’s foot collides with the radio in his hand and sends it spinning across the floor. Bozer grabs a lamp and smashes it down on the man’s head, knocking him out for good. But it’s too late. _ Joseph is probably already on his way back. _ Mac curses the lack of comms as it takes precious seconds to dial Jack’s contact on his phone. _ Off the books missions kind of suck like that. _

He skips right to the problem as soon as Jack answers. “All right, Jack, we got incoming. Five minutes, tops. Any luck on your end?” 

“No hard drives in the back house, just Joseph's gross little man cave. On the bright side, I did trash the place.”

“Okay, meet us out the side door,” Mac says, and then hangs up and glances at the lock. 

“You got a faster way through that door?” Bozer asks. 

“Now that we can make noise, I do.” The next few seconds are a blur, finding what he needs to supercharge the toothbrush’s battery and cause it to explode. 

Once the doorknob is dealt with...as well as a decent chunk of the door itself...Mac hurries in, and feels like crying with relief when he sees a pile of hard drives stacked on the desk. 

“All right. Which one's the senator's?” Bozer asks. 

“No clue. Just start trying 'em,” Mac says, already plugging the first one into a computer that, thankfully, Joseph was in too much of a hurry to password lock before he ran off to the landfill. 

“Can’t we just take them all?” Bozer asks.

“We have to be sure these are the right ones,” Mac says. “That he didn’t find Dragonfly and put that drive somewhere safer.”

Bozer sighs. “Okay, fine, we’re trying them all then.”

Mac’s phone rings, and he pulls it out. It’s Riley. “Mac, you’re about to have company.”

“We know,” Mac says. “Joseph left a guard here, and he caught us.” Bozer is still working on the hard drives, tossing the wrong ones across the room in frustration. Mac flinches as one smashes something that was sitting on a table. 

“Mac, Joseph’s men just got back. They're surrounding the place and trapping you inside. You got to get out of there.”

“We're doing our best here, Riley,” Bozer shouts. “Would that help?” Mac hears a door crash in, and flinches.

“We're out of time.” He starts shoving the rest of the untested hard drives into his bag. They’ll just have to hope for the best. 

And then Bozer shouts. “Hey, hey, Mac. This is it, right?” There’s a file blinking on the screen. _ Dragonfly. AVI. _

“Dragonfly, that's it. Grab it. Let's go.” 

Bozer shoves the hard drive in his pocket and they run for the stairs. They just have to get outside, get to Jack…

Mac feels a hand on his shoulder, hears shouting. He pushes Bozer ahead of him, out the door, to what he hopes is safety. Bozer has Dragonfly, he’s the one who can’t get caught. Maybe if Mac is a decoy, if they think the hard drives he has in his bag are the only ones that were taken...

He’s roughly grabbed by his hair and forced to his knees on the porch floor. Mac gasps in pain, the air driven out of his lungs by a fist in his stomach. “Well, well, let’s see what this one knows,” Joseph says cruelly, pulling Mac’s chin up with one finger. Mac shivers. He has no doubt that this is going to hurt. A lot.

A second punch to his ribs cracks something still not totally right after Mexico, and Mac groans, curling in on himself to try to protect his body. The next minute, he’s on his side on the ground, flinching away from a shower of kicks and blows. He tries to protect his head and stomach, but there are so many men, and it hurts. 

He swallows a sob as one of the men stomps on his knee, twisting it painfully. He doesn’t think it’s bad enough to keep him from walking, not yet, but another hit like that will at best dislocate the joint. 

Suddenly, there’s a rattle of gunfire over his head, and Mac hears one of the men shout in pain. The others are ducking, seeing cover, and Mac takes the opportunity to throw himself off the side of the porch and down into the bushes. Thorns tear at his skin and clothes, but he doesn’t care. It’s better than being in those men’s hands.

There’s a hand on his shoulder and he flinches, jumps, but it’s only Jack, with Bozer right behind him, both of them wide-eyed with concern. 

“Yo, Mac, you gotta stop doing that,” Jack says, glancing over the edge and firing off a couple more shots. “Not that I’m not happy to come bustin’ in and save your skinny ass, but you’re scaring me, dude.” 

“Bozer had the drive. I couldn’t let them catch him,” Mac says.

“Damn it, Mac, you’re more important than that dumb thing. I can put a bullet in it right now and save us all this hassle, you can throw it back to Joseph and we can get the hell outta here.” Jack says. “Wait, I can’t. I’m out.” 

“You’re out?” Bozer asks.

“Yeah, man, and I ain’t gonna be able to hold these guys off much longer by chuckin’ an empty gun at ‘em,” Jack says. 

And then there’s a loud honk and crash, and a large dump truck bursts through the gates of the compound, throwing dust and gravel. Mac thinks he sees Riley at the wheel. 

“Look!” Bozer says. 

“Let's go, let's go! Let's go!” Jack shouts, shoving Mac and Boze toward the truck. “Come on, let's go!”

“Thanks, Jack,” Mac pants as they run for the truck, Jack pulling him along so that his knee doesn’t give out completely. He stumbles and winces, fighting off a wave of nausea from the pain. 

“You didn’t think I was gonna let another psychopath get his hands on you, did you?” Jack asks, but there’s a current of real fear under the joking surface of his words. _ He knows that Jospeh likes to turn a profit, and I’m sure all he could see was me being sold on the black market to the highest bidder. _ Mac desperately hopes that isn’t the fate of any of the kids working the landfill, but the truth is he hasn’t seen too many girls over the age of ten, aside from Abina. He wonders if the only reason Abina herself hasn’t been sold off yet is her incredible computer skills, and if she knows that too.

_ No wonder she wants to get out of this life. _ Mac’s lived under the thumb of men like Joseph, and every single day is terrifying. _ You can’t be sure when they’ll get tired of you, or move on to someone else they like better. And then the best case scenario is being forgotten about and left to survive on your own. _ Whether it’s prison or the Ghana streets, being alone without protection is an unnerving prospect. And Mac is fairly sure that, like the cartels, Joseph isn’t content to let people who used to be his just walk away. 

Mac scrambles up the side of the truck with Bozer, throwing himself in the dump bed while Jack jumps into the passenger door. Riley guns the engine and the truck rumbles out the gate, bullets still pinging off the metal. 

“Riley? You okay?” Mac yells. 

“A little shaken up, but we’re okay.” 

Mac hears a frustrated sound. “Riley, you are bleeding!” Abina shouts. _ She’s in here too? _

“I know, but it’s not that bad.” Riley says. “Jack, don’t you start either.”

Jack is actually laughing. “I just like that you’ve got someone else who’s gonna call you on being an idiot and hiding wounds.”

“How bad is it?” Bozer asks. “Riley?”

“Graze on my arm.” Riley shouts back. “I’m a little more concerned about what’s going to happen to us all when those guys catch up, actually.”

Mac risks a peek over the back of the truck, and flinches. Joseph’s guys are following them in cars now, and he ducks as more bullets strafe the back of the truck. This isn’t good. 

He reaches down and grabs a heavy chunk of scrap from the shifting pile under his feet. 

“What, you’re gonna throw things at them?” Bozer asks. 

“You got a better idea?” Mac asks. He grabs a computer monitor and tosses it out the back, grinning as it lands on the hood of one of the vehicles, causing the SUV to swerve wildly. 

Unfortunately, Joseph’s guys aren’t idiots, and after watching one car get smashed, they hang back, weaving around and through the items Mac and Bozer are flinging out the back, still firing the occasional volley of gunshots at the truck. The trash is creating a decent minefield of traps that are slowing the pursuit down, but it’s not enough to lose them.

Until, apparently, it is. The remaining vehicles stop, turn around in the road, and drive away.

“Hey, am I seeing things, or did those dudes just totally, randomly stop chasing us?” Bozer asks. 

“They totally, randomly did,” Mac says, shaking his head. _ I can’t believe that was because of us. _“Which is either really good, or really…” He cuts off at the sight of several heavily armored jeeps bursting out from the treeline. 

“Yeah, it's bad!” Bozer shouts, ducking again.

Mac pulls out his phone and calls Jack. “Jack, any idea why is the military chasing us?”

“Nope.” There’s the sound of the phone being handed to someone else, and then Mac hears Abina talking. 

“Joseph has powerful friends in the government. That's how he keeps the landfill operating.”

“Did I mention how much I hate this guy?” Riley says somewhere in the background. 

Mac hangs up and turns to see Bozer looking at him, and the dwindling pile of trash in the truck, with concern. “Hey, Mac, you know how annoying it is when Jack runs out of bullets? Well, that's about to happen to us with random junk.”

A jeep pulls up alongside them, and Mac yells, hoping he can be heard over the engines. “We got company, Riley!”

The truck swerves wildly to the side, and Mac falls, landing hard on something with an edge that’s definitely left a bruise. _ I’m going to feel that tomorrow. _

He looks up just in time to see Bozer hefting a microwave over the edge of the dump bed. “Wait, no, no, no, no, not the microwave!” He shouts, and Bozer turns around, startled, then ducks as more bullets rattle against the side of the truck. 

“What? Why not?” 

Mac calls Jack’s phone again and asks him to put it on speaker. 

“Riley, when I give you the signal, stomp on the brakes.”

“Brakes?” Riley asks incredulously. 

“Look, nobody's in the mood to die today, dude,” Jack says. “Are you plannin’ to make them smash into us?”

“No, it’s a little more sophisticated than that.” Mac’s already tearing apart the microwave, pulling out the piece he needs. _ I really hope this was something someone threw away because they bought a newer model, not because it stopped working. Never thought I’d be hoping someone was wasteful. _

“What is that thing?” Bozer asks. 

“A magnetron.”

“Just tell me it's gonna save our lives, please,” Jack says. 

“Every microwave has a magnetron inside it, and basically it emits radio waves at such a high frequency they excite the molecules inside whatever you're cooking. But if you remove the magnetron from its housing and focus its energy into a narrow beam…”

“It’ll make them stop chasing us? Mac, please, less science. More ‘this is how we survive this’.”

“It will.” Mac hopes he sounds confident. “I just need to get closer to the alternators in the Jeeps' engines so I can fry them out with this thing.” He hands a cobbled-together power cord as close to the truck window as he can. “Jack, plug this in.”

“Okay, you're good,” Jack says, just as a hail of bullets shatters the mirror on that side. “Mac, time to do whatever you're doing with the Megatron and get these guys the hell off our tail.”

Mac shakes his head at Jack’s botched pronunciation and grabs what he needs. “Bozer, hit the popcorn button. Riley, hit the brakes!” 

It takes more time than he wishes it would have, but he watches with a grin as the vehicle alternators flame out, and the jeeps stall to a stop in the middle of the road. 

“Popcorn button? Really? Great job, Mac,” Bozer says. Mac falls back against what’s left of the trash and begins to laugh hysterically. Then he realizes the phone’s still on, and he can hear Jack whooping.

“Hooo yeah baby! Megatron saved the day. Which is weird, cause isn’t he the villain?” Mac and Bozer look at each other and burst out laughing again. 

* * *

THE WAR ROOM

Matty isn’t sure how exactly things went so wrong. Then again, it’s Mac and Jack and Riley. Things going sideways should probably be her immediate expectation.

She’s also not sure why Jack is going on about Megatron and arguing with Bozer about Transformers in the middle of this call, but she thinks it’s probably best not to ask.“Okay, Matty, we have the hard drive. That's a big "yee-haw" on that one. Mission accomplished. But, uh, we still got a problem. Joseph called out the big guns, and I’m pretty sure the military and the police are looking for us now. We need to get out of Ghana, like, now.”

Matty sighs. _ Of course you’ve managed to become wanted criminals in yet another country. _

“And we're taking Abina with us. So, we're just hoping you have her all squared away on that front, yeah?” 

“I'm working on it, Jack. I'll be in touch soon, hopefully with good news.” She has a meeting with Steckler in less than fifteen minutes.

She hears the phone change hands. “Hopefully's not gonna cut it, Matty,” Riley says. “We got to get Abina out of here or bad things are gonna happen.”

“Riley, I recognize that you've taken a liking to this young girl, but this op is off the books, remember? If we're gonna get Abina out of Ghana, it has to be done legally.”

“Yeah, we didn't forget,” Jack says. “We're just hoping whatever strings you're pulling, you...you pull 'em rather quickly.”

She can tell he’s worried, he always is anymore when they’re wanted by the police in foreign countries. After what happened to Mac in that jail in Peru (and yes, she knows about that, she knows more than she ever wanted to about Mac’s past, and the pieces of it that have bled into the present) she doesn’t blame him. 

“I’m doing the best I can. I promise, there is no rock I won’t dig up to try and get this resolved.” There’s a knock at her door, and she hangs up when she sees the secretary there. 

“Yes?”

“Senator Steckler is here, ma’am.”

“Tell him to come in.” 

Matty takes a deep breath. She’s not leaving this conversation until she gets Abina a flight out of Ghana. _ Riley’s determined to help this girl, and it reminds me of what I did for her. _She’d been trying to rebuild her career after the disaster Ethan’s betrayal left in its wake, and her every decision had been under scrutiny. Hiring a rebellious criminal hacker with a chip on her shoulder and authority issues had been a move few in the agency supported. But she’s had no reason to regret bringing Riley in. 

Steckler pushes the door open, glancing in at Matty. “I've wondered about this place. Never thought I'd score an invite.”

“Well, lucky for you I don't trust you to have this conversation anywhere else.”

“You have an update?” He asks. 

“My team retrieved your drive. But since this mission is off the books, I can’t just send in exfil. The Ghanian military is looking for my people now, and I have to get them through the normal political channels and onto a commercial flight out of the country. Preferably the next one.”

“I’ll be in touch with my people.” Matty has her own, but they might get faster results with an official government employee working on the situation.

“That’s not all.” 

“Not all? Matty, do you understand how much political capital I’m going to have to spend to get your people past the government watchdogs over there?”

“You owe me, Senator.” Matty says. “You told me, after we lost contact with Ethan, that felt responsible, and you’d do anything you could to help me. Well, now I’m collecting.”

“What is it you want, Matty?”

She keeps her voice cool and calm and firm. “I need your help getting someone out of Ghana.”

“Who?”

“A young girl who helped my people accomplish their objective.”

“You always were sentimental, weren’t you, Matty?” He shakes his head. “But that promise was made because of something that never happened.”

Matty’s still having a hard time wrapping her head around that part. That Ethan went undercover, that him turning on them, going rogue, was all an act. She can’t believe he lied to her about it. _ We trusted each other with everything. No matter how serious _. But there’s an even bigger part of her that can’t believe she ever thought Ethan actually turned. 

“I don’t care, Todd. You gave me your word that if I needed something, you would do it for me. I’ve never asked for anything before, and when this is over, we’re even. You owe me nothing, and frankly, I’ll be glad we’re through.” 

“I’ll do what I can.”

“No, you’ll have tickets booked on the next flight for my team _ and _ their local contact, or I’ll release the details of the Belgrade operation to every single news reporter in the country.” Matty straightens her back and gives Steckler a cold stare. “Do it.” 

* * *

SOMEWHERE IN GHANA

HOPEFULLY NOWHERE THE MILITARY AND POLICE WILL FIND THEM

Jack takes a deep, nervous breath, tying off the last bandage around Riley’s arm and leaning back against their truck. _ Well, it’s not exactly our truck, it’s a stolen truck that every single law enforcement and military personnel in the country is looking for. _ They’re going to have to ditch it and hope Joseph didn’t provide the military with descriptions. Jack figures if worst comes to worst, Riley, Bozer, and Abina can blend in well enough to stay off the radar, or at least give themselves a fighting chance. 

_ But Joseph saw Mac up close. Got a good look at him. _ And no matter what level of detail he gives in his description, there aren’t a lot of blond, blue-eyed, pale-skinned males in Ghana. Jack wonders how they’re supposed to make it onto a flight now. He hopes Matty’s taking care of that. 

Meanwhile, Riley’s got the hard drive plugged into her computer, checking on the status of Dragonfly (now that she can type without being pissed at Jack every three seconds for jostling her arm, excuse him for trying to make sure she doesn’t bleed out or get some creepy infection) and ensuring it hasn’t already been compromised. “Okay, it's a dot AVI extension. Means it's a video file. Without even opening it, I can see that it's over two gigs, created in 2010, and protected with AES 256-bit encryption.”

“Which means what, for those of us that were in the fifth grade twice?” Jack asks. 

“Someone really doesn't want anybody watching it,” Abina says.

“It’s also an encryption that takes days if not weeks to crack, unless you have specific, dedicated software. Joseph wouldn’t have had time to open Dragonfly himself.” 

“So now what?” Jack asks. “I say, if this Dragonfly thing is so dangerous, we just destroy the drive right here. Mac, you can make some acid and melt it down, right?”

“I could. But Matty wants the drive back. If she was asking us to destroy it, that would have been her orders.” Mac says. He’s leaning on the side of the truck, playing absently with a paperclip. “I think we should follow orders and return the drive with Dragonfly undamaged.”

“I see your point, dude, but listen. We got the whole country lookin’ for us. And if we get caught, not sayin’ we will, but you gotta consider it, and if those people get their hands on Dragonfly, then this is all worse than when it started and Joseph didn’t know he had a gold mine.” 

Mac nods slowly. “We should call Matty, though. Tell her everything and get her orders.”

“Since when are you such a stickler for the rules, kid?” Jack asks. Mac makes more in-field executive decisions than anyone. 

“Since what’s on it could be the key to stopping whatever James has planned,” Mac says in a low whisper. 

“Agreed,” Jack says, his face tight. 

Just then, Bozer’s phone rings, and he picks up, then smiles. “Good news, Abina. We’ve got a flight out of here, there’s a bush pilot a few miles south of our location who’s going to get us out of the country so we don’t have to run from the military while Matty sorts out your situation.” _ Probably someone who owed Matty a favor. _Jack’s pretty sure the woman can call in markers on every continent. 

“Congratulations,” Riley says. “Matty came through.”

“Like she always does,” Jack chuckles. “Now, we can discuss this on the plane, but right now we should get to the airstrip before soldiers start shutting everything that can fly down.” Private airstrips won’t be their first targets, but they will eventually decide that private planes could be stolen or hijacked. 

“Yeah, good plan,” Riley says. “Now we just need a new car.”

“Hey, how's about I drive this time, Furiosa?” Jack asks with a chuckle. 

Riley shrugs, then grimaces when the movement pulls on the wound in her arm. “If you insist.”

A phone rings, and Jack stops, turning. He knows _ everyone’s _ringtones, and that one he doesn’t recognize.

Abina pulls her own phone out of her pocket and holds it up to her ear. “Yes?”

Jack leans a little closer, he can hear shaky, sobbing breaths. “Abina. A-Abina, where are you?”

Abina’s eyes are wide with horror. “Danso?” 

“I need your help.” Jack stops, pressing a hand firmly to the side of the truck to ground himself. His memories are ringing with the echoes of Mac’s broken, devastated voice, whispering into a phone in the middle of the night. 

_ “Jack, help me, please, I messed up.” _

He can’t forget how shattered Mac sounded, how ruined and lost and _ young. _ Jack hears an echo of what surely must have been his own helpless pain when Abina replies. “Danso, what's wrong?” 

“Please,” The boy’s voice continues, and then is cut off. Jack flinches. He can almost hear the crack of boot against skin, and he glances quickly away from the bruises forming on Mac’s face and arms. 

The voice on the other end isn’t Murdoc, but to Abina, Jack knows it might as well be. It’s Joseph. “I gave you a place to live. A way to earn money. And how did you thank me? Huh? By helping people steal from me.” Jack can see Abina’s hands shaking violently. She’s terrified. “Now here's what's going to happen next. You bring me that hard drive, and whatever's on it that I overlooked, or I start hurting your friends. And we both know that I can always find more scavengers, eh? You have thirty minutes or I start with Danso.”

The call goes dead, and Abina looks up, her eyes wide and filled with tears that are threatening to spill over. “What are we going to do? He has Danso! And my friends!”

“Hey, hey, hey. We’re gonna get them back,” Jack says, reaching for the girl and pulling her in so she can lean against his chest. She pushes back for a second, but then collapses into him, and he feels tears mixing with the sweat on his shirt. “We’re gonna get them, it’s gonna be okay.” He doesn’t know how, yet, but he can see the same determination on Mac, Riley, and Bozer’s faces. _ We’ve taken on worse than Joseph and lived to tell the tale. _

* * *

BACK AT THE LANDFILL

TWELVE MINUTES UNTIL THEY’RE OUT OF TIME

Bozer glances through the makeshift video scanner he and Mac and Riley just cobbled together from literal junk. “All right, I'm counting four, maybe five of his men by the hostages.” He blinks when the screen they’re using flickers and a bunch of staticky lines run across it. 

“Bozer, any chance you could focus on that thing?” Riley asks. 

“Doing the best I can, Riley. Not exactly working with Panavision precision here.” He turns the camera part slowly, scanning the area the best he can, then picks up his phone and dials Jack. “Okay. Junkyard Joe's got three two-man teams patrolling the yard looking for us.”

Jack’s voice is just a whisper. “Yeah, make that four two-man teams, Boze. They're everywhere. I wish we could just shoot them.” He sighs, and Bozer hears something like one hand thudded into another one angrily._ He’s been ready for a fight since Mac got beaten up and Riley got shot. _ Mac’s limp is getting noticeably worse, he’s holding his leg carefully to avoid jostling it, and Bozer hears him hiss softly in pain when he moves. 

Bozer can hear the soft crunches of footsteps and faint sounds of breathing for a few moments, and then Jack whispers into the phone again. “All right, I think I can carve a path through the patrolling guards, get us close enough to Joseph, but even if I do, we still got a problem: the stationary guards. Unless I can knock all them out at the same time, we still got a problem.”

Mac shakes his head, then grimaces at the pain the movement must cause his battered body. “We can't. The moment we move on them, someone could get hurt, or worse. We need to separate the kids from the guards.”

“Yeah, agree, but how?” Bozer asks.

“Signal the kids without Joseph's men knowing.” Mac’s forehead is wrinkled in a frown of concentration, and he’s running his hands over the pile of junk in front of them. Abina watches him, her eyes filled with a mixture of hope and fear. She hasn’t said a thing since that disastrous phone call. 

“How are we gonna signal the kids without getting Joseph's attention?” Riley asks. 

“What's the main difference between the hostages and the men guarding them?” Mac asks. 

“Okay, Mac, you're doing that thing again,” Bozer says. _ He starts getting lost in his head and doing this think out loud thing where he asks a lot of questions, and sometimes, if we can’t answer them, it’s like his brain shuts down. _ Bozer wonders if it’s a way of coping with some disconnects that are there now, if maybe Mac really can’t remember what he wants to, or if the right words won’t come, and it just stalls his brain completely. _ He used to do that to annoy me, but now I don’t think it’s a game anymore. _

“Age,” Riley says suddenly. “The hostages are much younger than the men guarding them.”

Mac nods, and his eyes lose that panicked look they were getting a moment ago. _ He’s not gonna freeze up now. _ “We can use that. People's ability to hear high frequencies degrades as they age, so a five-year-old can hear higher frequencies than a twenty-year-old, who can hear higher frequencies than a forty-year-old. You just have to calibrate the frequency.” 

He pulls out an old radio and some other electronics and begins wiring them together. Bozer cringes as a high-pitched whine emits from the speakers for a moment, one of the batteries at least is still good. 

“You guys hear that?” Mac asks 

“Yeah,” Riley says. Bozer can only nod. 

Mac tweaks something, and the horrible sound rises and fades out altogether. Bozer breathes a sigh of relief. “How about now?” Mac asks. 

Riley and Bozer shake their heads, but Abina sits with her head tilted to the side, listening intently. “I can still hear it.”

“Right, because you're younger; we're older, we can't hear it. Which should work on a guard.”

“Wow,” Riley says, grinning. 

Mac tosses Abina another wired-together creation. “Abina, I need you to record a message to your friends, telling them to run when they hear the whistle. Fast.”

As soon as Abina’s done, Riley helps Mac connect the improvised recording device to the transmitter, and turns it on. 

Bozer can’t hear anything, but the effect is clear from looking through his static-filled viewfinder. The kids are looking at each other, then around as if they’re trying to see where Abina is. 

“It's working,” Riley says. “The kids can hear Abina's recording, but the guards are totally oblivious.”

“Okay, go,” Mac says, handing Abina one of the spare hard drives. 

“I can’t.”

Mac puts his hands on her shoulders. “Yes, yes you can. You’re smart, and brave, and you can do this. For your friends.” She nods once, then disappears into the heaps of rubbish. Bozer glances through his screen at what’s happening now. Behind him, Mac is making something with batteries. Bozer wonders briefly what it is, then figures he’ll find out soon enough. 

Abina steps out of the shelter of a pile of computers and into the guards’ line of sight. She holds up the fake hard drive. “Joseph. I brought you what you want. Now let them go.” Her voice is loud enough to carry all the way to where the others are hiding, and Bozer feels a deep respect for her. _ She’s terrified, but you’d never know it. _

“Where are your new friends?” Joseph asks. 

“They left.”

The man scoffs. “Without the drive that was so important to them that they came all the way to Ghana to retrieve?” 

“I swapped it out for a decoy before I ditched them.” Abina sounds perfectly confident. 

“Maybe the 12 of you will survive after all, huh? Give me the drive,” Joseph says, stepping forward. 

“I'll give it to you. But only after you let them go.”

Joseph shakes his head. “You are in no position to make any demands, Abina.”

“Actually, I am.”

There’s a muffled shout from somewhere in the yard, and Bozer sees Joseph’s head whip around to see where it’s coming from. They’re about to lose their element of surprise. And then Mac’s phone rings, buzzing against the top of the computer tower where he laid it with a disturbingly loud hum. Mac snatches it up and answers. 

It’s Jack. “Okay, Mac. Perimeter's clean. You're clear to the hostages.”

Bozer can tell Abina is stalling for time, trying to distract Joseph, who appears to be reaching for his radio, probably about to check in with the perimeter guards to find out the source of the noise. “Whatever's on this drive must be very valuable…” 

“Enough!” Joseph shouts, and then Bozer sees, too late, that his hand wasn’t going to his radio. It was going to his gun, and now that gun is aimed at Abina. 

“Mac, it's time,” Bozer whispers.

Mac nods. “Riley, give them the signal.” He jumps up, grabbing his handful of the little devices he made, and Riley lets out a low whooping whistle, like the kids did before to signal Joseph’s arrival. 

“Give me the drive, now.” Joseph’s voice is cold, but behind him, the kids leap into action, running for cover. The guards shout, but it’s too late already. Mac is flinging what look like smoke bombs into the middle of the open area where they were standing, and the air is filled with a choking chemical gas. Bozer pulls his shirt over his nose, squeezes his eyes mostly shut, and wades into the fight, smashing one guy in the face with his fist. _ After Mac left, I told myself I was gonna learn to protect him better. That I was going to be able to fight harder than anyone else. _ And his training has paid off. _ Spending that time in the gym helped distract me from how afraid I was for Mac, too. _ And all his anger at Murdoc’s cruelty and James’s heartlessness is put into his swing. He can’t smash in either of their noses, but he can take down these guys.

The fight is a blur that almost seems over before it began. Once Jack shows up with a gun, it’s all over, and the men who are still on their feet start to surrender. One guy doesn’t do it fast enough for Jack’s liking and earns a bullet to his thigh. Bozer recognizes one of the men who was punching Mac on the porch, and he can’t bring himself to even feel sympathy. 

He only realizes he’s bleeding when he sits down on a stack of old computer towers, and one of the other kids approaches him, wide-eyed and offering an old, torn shirt as a bandage. He doesn’t remember taking a bullet, but the graze on his leg says otherwise. And now that he notices it, it hurts. A lot. 

He gets back to his feet, grimacing, and walks over to where Mac and Jack are exchanging one-armed hugs. 

“We did it,” he says with a grin, and Mac nods. “We sure did.”

Jack pulls out his phone. “Hey Matty, we left a little mess at the junkyard for you to clean up. I mean, I’d be happy to see these guys rot in the trash pile where they belong, but I think we might want to put them somewhere with a few more bars, you know what I’m saying?”

“I’m working on that, Jack. Apparently those soldiers you guys got into a microwave fight with,” Bozer can hear her chuckling, “were acting well outside any orders from the Ghanian military authorities, and the officers Joseph bought off will be facing charges as well.” 

“Ah, that's great news,” Jack says. 

“You can also tell Abina that she's booked on the next commercial flight back to L.A.,” Matty continues. “But we still need to secure her temporary housing while we sort out her situation.”

“Matty, I don't know how you did that, but thank you,” Riley says. “And...don’t worry about the housing. I’ve got space for a new roommate.” She turns to Abina. “Hey, you cool with crashing with me when we get to L.A.?”

“Yes!” Abina grins. “Thank you, Riley!” She picks up the phone. “Thank you, Matty!” Bozer grins at the unfettered enthusiasm in her voice, it’s fantastic. _ Sometimes this job can make you jaded. And then people like her come along and remind you why you keep doing it. _

“You can thank me by getting that drive back to the Phoenix. Pronto.”

“Yes, ma'am,” Jack says, then hangs up. “Okay, Abina, you ready to roll?”

Abina turns and looks back at the kids who are tying up Joseph’s men with old electric cords. “What will happen to them?”

Mac leans down, putting his hands on her shoulders. “Matty’s gonna be sending in Phoenix teams under the cover of humanitarian aid workers to sweep up Joseph’s people. They’ll stick around and make sure your friends are looked after.” He smiles. 

“And I will come back,” Abina says. “I promised them all, if I got out, I would come back for them.” Bozer nods, not trusting himself to speak. _ That’s almost exactly what I promised Jerry. Once. _ But this time has a chance to be different. 

“Come on, we’re going to miss our flight!” Jack shouts. “And Bozer, Riley, you need to change. They’re not gonna let you two on the plane with all that blood everywhere.” 

* * *

THE PHOENIX FOUNDATION-ONE WEEK LATER

HOME SWEET HOME

“How’s life with a new roommate, Riley?” Sam asks, as they make their way to the War Room. Matty’s called for a meeting, and even though it was supposed to be related to their mission in Ghana, Cage was also requested to join. _ I wouldn’t be surprised if Matty or Patty has asked her to start taking a more active role in the administration side of this agency _. 

“Honestly? Fantastic. At least Abina doesn’t put pepper in my oatmeal.” Riley chuckles. “Really, she spends most of her time getting ready to take her tests and try for a scholarship. But we did go and get ice cream on Saturday. She thinks my love of mint chocolate chip must be an acquired taste.” 

Jack chuckles as he opens the door to the War Room for them, he must have caught the tail end of that conversation. “But other than a lack of appreciation for your ice cream preferences, it sounds like you two are getting along well.”

Riley nods. “I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who knows more about computers. Abina worked with discarded scraps and she’s got more technical skills than half the CIA task force I was on when I started. She wants to major in computer science and technology engineering of some kind. Develop better methods of recycling old components and disposing of them.” She feels as proud saying that as she would if the girl was actually her little sister. _ Funny, how fast you can get attached to people. _

“She’s got more experience than anyone in that area,” Mac says, sitting on a chair with a handful of paperclips on the table in front of him. “She’s going to go places.”

“Yes, she is.” Riley sees a lot of herself in Abina. Someone who did what they had to to get by, but who could be so much more with the right people training her. _ Matty did that for me. And now I’m paying it forward. _

And speaking of Matty...Riley glances at the woman standing in the front of the War Room. _ Whatever Dragonfly is, she was very happy to have it back. _ Riley still doesn’t know what it is, but she’s okay with not knowing. Because everything she’s ever seen Matty do has been to help and protect the people she cares about. _ She’d never put us in danger if she could help it. And whatever this is, she’s sure we’re safer never seeing it. _

But Matty isn’t alone. Thornton is there as well, and suddenly Cage’s presence makes a lot more sense. _ She goes where Patty goes, right now. _ The two of them keep as many secrets as Matty. She has no doubt that whatever they’re working on, she won’t get a straight answer from either of them. She won’t even bother to try. 

Matty turns around from the screen with a smile. She looks tired, but there’s something in her eyes that Riley doesn’t recognize. Or rather, something missing. It’s like a darkness, or some kind of weight, has been on Matty the whole time Riley has known her. And now it’s gone. 

“I'm happy to report that not only has Joseph Musah's entire operation been ripped out by the roots, but the corrupt Ghanaian soldiers that were helping him have also been rounded up.”

“That’s fantastic,” Mac says. “And Dragonfly?”

“That hard drive has been destroyed,” Matty says. _ Oh, way to hedge your bets. _ Riley has known Matty long enough to know when the woman isn’t telling them everything. _ She did destroy the drive, I don’t doubt that. But I also think she removed Dragonfly before she did. _

“See, Mac, I told you, we could have dumped it in acid,” Jack says, but Mac elbows him into silence. Or maybe it’s Matty’s glare that does it. 

“How is the team on the ground doing?” Riley asks. She and Abina made a video call to them yesterday, so Abina could tell her friends about everything new and show them where she’s living, but she’d still like to know if there have been any further developments. 

“Our Phoenix aid team is working to clean up the site and help find these kids legitimate, and safer, employment. Some of the older ones we’re considering for recruitment into our data analysis units on the ground in the area.” Matty says. 

“That’s...that’s great news, Matty.” Mac smiles. 

“Hiring you paved the way for us to consider more...unconventional opportunities to find valuable people to add to our teams.” Patty smiles. “The Phoenix is more you than just its name, Mac. You’ve helped change the fundamental nature of this agency, of how we see the world. Things never fit neatly into boxes for you, and that’s an attitude we could all use a little more of. You proved that people can surprise us in the most incredible ways.” 

“Unfortunately, this isn’t over,” Patty says. “We found intel on one of Joseph’s computers that indicated he somehow got his hands on a hard drive belonging to an Interpol agent. An Interpol agent who was tasked with protecting a diplomat whose public policies have made him a major target. And before we were able to clear the information, one of the techs discovered Joseph had been hacked. That data is compromised, and since Phoenix was the last agency to have their hands on it, you all are being sent to London as of...ten minutes from now.” Patty glances at her watch. “This time, you’re taking the jet.” 

Riley texts Abina to let her know that she won’t be coming home tonight. And she texts Diane to look out for the girl, just in case. _ No matter what happens, Abina’s got good family looking out for her. _

* * *

Matty waits until the team has left the building and Patty’s gone back to her office. _ Not that she isn’t already aware of exactly what Dragonfly is, but... _Matty can’t bring herself to watch it with anyone present.

She sets the wall screens to frosted and soundproof, plugs a small black flashdrive into her computer, and waits for it to load. 

When it does, she stares at the screen for a long moment before pressing play. _ If this was a videotape, I’d be wearing it out, _ she thinks, and then the familiar, all too familiar, voice chases every other thought out of her head. 

“My name is Ethan Reigns. Born February 11, 1974. As you can see, I'm standing in an office at CIA headquarters in Washington, D. C. Today's date is February 6, 2010. I'm making this video because tomorrow I start deep cover, and I need my true identity on record in case something ever happens to any the few people who are read-in on my assignment, codenamed Dragonfly.”

She watches as the video blacks out, and then a second one appears. It’s the same man, four months later. Except this time, he’s not standing inside CIA offices. He’s standing in a small room somewhere, with a view of the ocean out the window beside him.

“This is Ethan Reigns. Today is my last day as an official agent for the CIA. Tomorrow I will be cutting ties with the agency and all personnel, and I will no longer maintain contact with my handler. This is an agency-sanctioned action, and I hope to protect my family from repercussions and also gain access to one James MacGyver, a former government agent, who has shown suspicion of my legitimacy in S-Company. I’m sure he’s been shadowing me, attempting to find proof of my status as an agent. I can no longer meet with my handler or I risk my cover and my life.” Matty swallows hard. _ He didn’t join James, he was trying to hunt him. _ But now she wonders if Ethan is even still alive. _ He tried to go up against James. And aside from Mac, no one has survived that. _

Ethan removes the small silver band on his pinky finger, their answer to a wedding ring. “Matty I want you to know that this is the hardest thing I've ever had to do. I'm so sorry. I love you. And I hope someday you see this and can forgive me.” 

Matty takes a deep, shaky breath, sniffing back the tears that threaten to fall. She twists the silver band on her own finger with a slow, repetitive motion. 

“I love you, too.”


	8. Revenge+Catacombs+Banshee

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you follow me on Tumblr, you've probably seen the pictures of who's been taking up most of my life recently...but if not, I have officially gotten my new puppy! Riley is as mischievous as her namesake, but her puppy eyes are so much like Mac...And I'm becoming convinced that I would actually need supermax level security to keep her where she's supposed to be! Despite all of that, I did manage to get a chapter done this week! Which makes me very happy, because this is one I've been looking forward to...

###  308-Revenge+Catacombs+Banshee

EN ROUTE TO NEW YORK CITY

JACK HAS A FEELING THEY’RE NOT GOING FOR THE ATMOSPHERE

“So, Matty, what’s the rush on this job?” Jack asks once they’re settled into the Phoenix jet and the briefing screen flashes on. His team’s still sort of reeling from the London op they just finished. Bozer’s nursing a twisted ankle, and Leanna and Cage are both out of commission; Cage sporting a nasty arm burn and Leanna a pretty severe fracture of her collarbone and a concussion to boot. And Riley still has stitches in her arm from the Dragonfly op, Mac still has bruises, and a nice new gouge on his shoulder and a twisted knee courtesy of London. 

Whatever this op is, it has to be incredibly serious for Matty to send them out like this, with two team members medically unfit and the rest of them battered and exhausted. 

“We have less than twenty-four hours before the leader of a top secret military task force is assassinated.” A picture appears on the screen. “Meet Major Daniel Collins. Former EOD overwatch in the Sandbox, currently the new head of an international investigative force working to stop materials used by terrorists from being imported into the U.S.” Matty reappears, frowning. “Collins was scheduled to be honored tonight by the Mayor of New York for stopping a shipment of explosives components that were being sent to a sleeper cell in Manhattan. And as of four hours ago, he recieved a phone call from an unidentified woman telling him that in twenty-four hours, he’ll be the guest of honor at his funeral, not a gala.”

“Someone’s dramatic,” Bozer observes.

“Definitely,” Riley says. “So who is this person? If you hadn’t said it was a woman, I would have assumed it was Murdoc. Unless he’s disguising his voice?” 

Jack stiffens.  _ Is this really a lead on that psychopath? _ They haven’t heard anything from him lately. Not since they found that camera watching Mac’s house. But radio silence is actually more terrifying than the man keeping up a running commentary on his actions and whereabouts. 

“I’m afraid it’s not Murdoc. This is in fact a different assassin, but another one that the intelligence community is having a lot of trouble getting their hands on. They call her the Banshee,” Matty says. 

Cage nods. “I’ve heard of her. Contract assassin, IRA trained. She’s worked with multiple rebel groups and assassinated several diplomats and heads of state. She’s incredibly dangerous. Never crossed paths personally, but she’s almost as good as me.” Jack shakes his head; Sam’s cool confidence is one of the reasons Jack likes working with her. In a job like this, there’s no room for self-doubt. 

“She’s been on Phoenix radar for a while now too,” Matty says. “The only reason we know as much about her as we do is this video of one of her early kills.” A video flashes up on the screen. 

Riley zooms in on part of a telecast of an Irish politician, a moderate who, the video description states, is arguing against forceful reunification. There’s a sudden crack of gunfire, and the man slumps over. And in the section Riley is zooming into, there’s a flicker of movement, a face in a window, half shadowed by a hood. 

“It’s the only time she’s ever been caught on camera,” Matty says. “But we know she’s a woman based on her calls; there’s no voice alteration software used.”

“Calls?” Bozer asks. 

“She always calls her victim sometime in the twenty-four hours before her next hit will happen. And she makes some form of gloating comment about their deaths.” Matty shakes her head. “That’s why she’s called the Banshee, because she announces her kills.” 

“And she’s still able to make the hits?” Jack asks. 

“Despite every precaution her victims take, she’s always been able to go through with it.”

“Sounds an awful lot like Murdoc,” Jack says. “That’s just sick.” He shudders, remembering their first altercation with the assassin, finding his broken phone that led them to his threatening message to Mac.  _ And ever since then, he’s taunted us. Kept us guessing and wondering and worrying. _ Jack thinks it’s sad that he actually feels better about Mac’s safety when they’re on ops.  _ At least then I know I need to be on alert, watching his back. _ He’s afraid to let his guard down for one minute anymore, even at the house. 

Matty nods. “I’m going to have Cage and Leanna, if she feels up to it, working on the angle of who hired the Banshee, but since we have such a limited window of time before the hit happens, I want the rest of you to stick to Collins like glue.” Matty says. “If Collins avoids the gala, she’ll only find another chance to strike; as a matter of fact, we think one of the reasons she calls her victims is to create an environment of panic that she can then manipulate. Proceeding according to schedule should alter her usual M.O. Jack, you’ll be joining the major’s personal bodyguards. Mac, Bozer, Riley, work the crowd. We’re looking for a woman in her late twenties to early thirties.”

“What if the hit isn’t supposed to happen at the gala?” Riley asks. “What if that’s just what she wants us to think?”

“That’s why, for the next twenty hours, you are going to be Major Collins’s shadows.” Matty says. “He’s been informed of your arrival and your objective, and he’s well aware it’s in his best interests to cooperate. Collins isn’t the type to give you grief. He understands the world too well for that.”

Jack nods. Working counterterrorism has likely, if anything, made Collins more paranoid than the average person. He’s also ex-military, which means he ought to respect Jack’s opinions and plans, and not dismiss them like all too many politicians tend to do. 

“Your one advantage is that the Banshee operates solely with kill shots. No poisons or explosives.” Matty sighs. “But she’s also never walked away from an unfinished contract.” 

* * *

NEW YORK CITY: T-MINUS TWO HOURS UNTIL THE GALA

RILEY NEEDS A NEW DRESS

“What do you think of this one?” Riley asks, stepping out of the dressing room. 

“I think that’s perfect,” Mac says. “The sleeves won’t damage your range of motion?”

“No more than the stitches in my shoulder already do,” Riley says with a small shrug. Normally she goes for sleeveless or cap-sleeve styles, for just that reason, but now it’s a little more important to cover up the line of black thread crossing her upper arm. It’s better not to draw attention to herself for any reason tonight, which is why she’s going with a dress that’s a little more conservative than she usually buys. It’s a nice simple black dress, with a shallow v-neck, sleeves that cover the stitches, and a just below knee-length, sequined skirt she’s already determined she can easily move in.

“You found what you wanted?” She asks, glancing at the stack of clothes in Mac’s hands. 

“I think so. The jacket’s a little large, but the next size down didn’t fit right,” Mac says with a slight shrug. 

“Good thing Jack isn’t here or he’d tease you about being so skinny,” Riley says. Honestly, sometimes, she does worry about Mac a little. He’s always been thin, but it doesn’t seem like he ever really gained weight back properly after Murdoc. His wrists and hands seem bonier than before, and his face looks a little more angular, less boyish. “Alright, let’s get back to the hotel in time to change.” 

Riley grins as she hands the cashier her Phoenix card.  _ It’s nice to be able to pick out a good dress without worrying about the price. _ She’s not going to make Matty’s jaw drop, It’s a bit pricey anyway. but her dark navy gown got ruined in London, so she can call a new dress a necessary expense of the op.

Bozer’s tux only needed a little stain remover, he’d spilled a cocktail sauce on it accidentally right at the beginning of the dinner that had gone so downhill. Mac, on the other hand, had only a dirty dress shirt and a torn pair of pants left from his own suit. The tie was used to restrain a Serbian arms dealer, the jacket to stuff under a door to prevent smoke inhalation, and she’s not sure what his shoelaces ended up in, but when he and Jack rejoined Riley after they got split up in the drainage tunnels, Mac’s shoes were gone. And Jack isn’t telling what happened. 

She hands the card back to Mac as he prepares to check out his own items, then stands off to the side, watching. She frowns at the sight of the scars she can see when the sleeves of his button-down slide too far up his arms, and she can’t forget watching him agonize over picking out the right collar and tie that would hide the marks on his neck, but not feel like the collar itself was choking him. 

_ It’s unfair that what Murdoc did marked him so visibly.  _ She was hoping when they heard about the assasination contract, that this was going to be some kind of lead on that monster.  _ I don’t like the thought that he’s out there somewhere, waiting for the right chance to take Mac away from us again. _ She feels helpless.  _ All that time, Murdoc had him, and none of us could help him. In the end, he had to save himself. _

She knows Murdoc isn’t done with Mac, his continued taunts are proof of that. And she knows the thought bothers Mac as well. He’s trying to move on, but with Murdoc still out there, that’s hard.  _ Once we put that monster behind bars, for good, Mac can finally finish healing. _

Still, she has to admit, Mac isn’t the fragile, lost boy she was learning to accept before James turned their world upside down. Mac is stronger now, a little harder, a little less easily pushed around. He doesn’t roll over and cower when someone confronts him. He stands up and gives as good as he gets. Part of her misses that almost innocent, in a strange way, boy that she met a few years ago. But a lot more of her is proud of the man he’s become.  _ Jack told me how he stood up to James, and I’ve seen it myself when we’re in trouble. _

Mac joins her as soon as he’s finished checking out. “Ready to go crash a party?” he asks. She smiles and nods.  _ He’s not a completely different person. Just a little stronger one. _

* * *

THIS PARTY IS DEFINITELY NOT MAC’S COMFORT ZONE

Mac tugs at his tie and frowns, looking around the room at the sea of people. He wishes Jack was next to him, but Jack is up front, in a line with seven other guys with short buzz-cuts, cheap suits, and comm wires in their ears.  _ You’re fine. It’s just crowded and that overwhelms you now. _ Mac takes a deep shaky breath. At least it’s not like that frat party. He has no desire to be hit on by anyone. He’s here to do his job and he hopes it’s going to be over soon. Riley and Bozer are checking the crowd for anyone who might fit their killer’s profile, and once Riley has the results, they’ll start mingling. Oddly enough, trying to smoke out a trained killer sounds better than the small talk Mac is forcing in order to blend in. 

And then a familiar face emerges from the crowd. “Charlie Robinson?” Mac asks. He recognizes Jack’s old EOD tech. “What are you doing here?”

“Major Collins is my Army liason for my investigative unit.” Charlie says. “What are  _ you _ doing here?”

“Uh…” Mac isn’t sure how much they  _ can _ tell Charlie. 

Riley, thankfully, cuts in, stepping up beside Mac and holding out her phone for Mac to see the images outlined in red. “Charlie, we have intel that suggests Major Collins could be the target of an assasination attempt.”  _ She’s been at this a lot longer than I have, she knows the protocols. _ The truth is, they’ve worked with Charlie twice on Phoenix operations, and he helped get Mac’s name cleared. He knows plenty about what they really do. 

Charlie frowns. “I’m not surprised he has enemies, honestly. He’s spearheading a surgical strike force now that deals with international weapons smuggling, especially explosives components. He’s hoping that being able to trace the routes that they come in through will help us identify domestic terrorists.” 

Mac nods. “It’s no wonder that would put him on a lot of people’s radar.”

“Do you know who’s coming after him?” Charlie asks. 

Riley lowers her voice. “Someone called the Banshee.”

“Never heard of them,” Charlie says. 

“She’s an assassin,” Mac says. “But we think she was hired by some of those terrorists Collins was working to stop. Do you have any idea who could be behind it?” Maybe Charlie’s job as a combination explosives disposal specialist and domestic terrorism investigator will help them find the pieces of the puzzle they’re missing. 

“Well, the New York cell was part of a larger organization, but they’re more the type to handle their problems themselves, if you know what I mean.” Charlie frowns. “He did confiscate a large shipment in Chechnya not long ago. The rebels he took it from are known to be fond of outsourcing contracts.” 

“I’ll get that to the rest of our team,” Riley says. “They’re trying to trace the Banshee by tracing who hired her.” She turns to Mac. “I’ve identified five guests who fit our profile for the Banshee immediately,” Riley says. “We can move on to others if we eliminate these, she could be wearing a disguise.” She glances at Charlie. “Just keep an eye out for any young women who seem to be moving in really close to the Major.” He nods, and moves away, greeting Bozer as he walks up to the other two.

Riley holds out her phone, showing them both the images of the people who most closely fit the profile she and Cage worked up of the Banshee’s probable identity.  _ She and Bozer still had working scanner glasses. _

“Okay, I’ve got the one with the short blond hair,” Riley says. “Bozer, you want to take the one in the red dress?” He nods, grinning. “Mac, you’ve got the redhead at the bar.” 

Mac walks up just in time to hear the woman order a whiskey, straight up. She sounds more like Jack’s type than Mac’s, but he hopes he can get her to talk. He wonders if it’s worth faking the Texas accent too. He knows Jack criticizes his attempts at imitation, but 

He knows being too direct will probably just make her walk away, but he also doesn’t want to come across as a weird random stranger who is just as untrustworthy as a flirt.  _ Talking to new people is hard. _ He’s not sure he’s ever really learned how to start conversations. 

Rather surprisingly, he doesn’t have to. While he’s still racking his brain for a good thing to say that isn’t cheesy, weird, or way too nerdy, the woman turns to him and smiles. 

“I’m Eileen,” she says, lifting her drink. 

Caught off guard, Mac chokes and blinks. “Uh, m-my name’s...um, Lucas.” He hates how his voice is trying to go all over the place again, and also that he almost didn’t remember his cover name in time.  _ Damn it. I didn’t have much time to prepare, but...I can’t even remember exactly what profession I was supposed to be in now _ . Some sort of aspiring actor is all he can come up with at the moment, and he’s pretty much blown any credibility for that occupation already, he’s clearly not self-collected enough to be on a stage or screen.  _ Great. Wonderful first impression. _ And the fact that she’s the one who initiated the conversation probably means she’s not even the mark, so he’s made a fool of himself in front of some random civilian. Or government agent. He can’t decide which is worse.

“Well, it’s nice to meet you...Lucas.” She’s clearly sizing him up, and he suddenly hopes she’s not part of Charlie’s unit. If she is, she’ll probably recognize his face from all the work Charlie and his team did to clear Mac’s criminal charges.  _ It would mean she wasn’t our assassin, but it might also blow my cover if she decides to use my real name.  _

He hopes she doesn’t press the issue, and also hopes she buys the cover name he clearly stumbled over.  _ I hope she thinks I’m just awkward. _ Bozer assured him ‘Lucas’ was a name that fit him well, but Mac’s not sure he sees it.  _ Then again, ‘Angus’ doesn’t seem to suit me at all, and that’s my  _ real _ name. _

Eileen takes another sip of her drink, turning to look out at the crowd. “I’m not much for the party atmosphere,” She says. “Social occasions bore me. Anyone interesting always avoids them.” She frowns. “You look like you feel the same way.”

“I guess we all have our obligations.” He’s hoping she’ll reveal something about the reason she’s here. 

Eileen nods. “I suppose we do.” 

Mac startles slightly when his comm buzzes. It’s Riley. “Mac, I’ve been running facial rec on our suspects. Four of the five check out, but yours...I’m still running her through international databases, but...just stay on her. We’ll be ready to back you up. Just let us know if you need it.”

“Yes.” Mac could be just belatedly answering Eileen’s comment, and she seems to take it as such, frowning, but accepting it. “I’d like to know what your definition of boring is.”

“Standing around chatting about nothing. I prefer a good fistfight. It accomplishes more than conversation.”

“Well, I think fistfights are going to be frowned upon here, but…” Mac nods toward the patio. “We could...take a walk.” His fingers are tapping nervously on the bar, he’s forcing himself not to pull out a paperclip to channel it; it’s better for this cover. “I think I could use a little fresh air myself.” 

“That doesn’t sound like such a bad idea.” Eileen smiles, finishes off her drink, and the two of them step out onto the patio. Mac sees Bozer and Riley in the crowd, and subtly gives them a nod. Things are okay, they don’t need to step in. Yet.

He kind of hopes this woman  _ is _ their international assassin. Because if she’s not, she’s definitely flirting, and he doesn’t want to deal with that right now.  _ But if she is our mark, then why is she singling me out and being sociable? _ He doesn’t think that fits the Banshee’s trademark hits. Then again, unpredictability could be how she’s survived this long. 

“It’s a nice night,” He says lamely, leaning on the railing. 

Eileen raises an eyebrow. “So it’s going to be just as boring out here too, then?”

“Well, actually I can talk about vector adjustments factoring in wind resistance, if you’d prefer that to me making generic comments on the weather.” 

“Let me guess. You’re another one of those ex-army guys. Who thinks being able to shoot a bullet in a straight line means they’re somebody.” She frowns.

“Guilty as charged,” Mac says. He’s already ruined his cover story, but he  _ is  _ getting somewhere, because clearly she doesn’t recognize him, which tells him she’s definitely not in any counterterrorism position that’s close to Charlie.  _ He said my name was common knowledge to pretty much all the counterterrorism people he worked with. Apparently, I was kind of infamous. _ He hates that, but it’s working in his favor, because it means this girl is either  _ very _ new, or she’s not here because she’s part of an investigative team. 

He’s narrowed her potential reasons for being here down a little, and maybe he can cut it down more.  _ If she’s not counterterrorism, she could be ex-military. _ He decides to try and channel Jack, or at least as much of Jack as he’s capable of. “I was a sniper in Afghanistan for a couple years.” He’s not old enough to have as much experience as Jack, and he doesn’t know specific details of anything that would have happened while he could conceivably have been serving in the military, but he hopes he can fake it. “I was in Afghanistan from 2008 to 2012.”

“I was there briefly,” she says. “2011.”

“What province?” Mac asks, desperately trying to remember where Jack said he was around that time. “I was in Kandahar and Logar for a while, but most of the time I just operated out of Gardez.” He thinks that sounds right, that that’s what Jack told him that one night after he had too many beers and they’d just gotten back from that op in Pakistan that almost went horribly wrong.

“I was further north,” she says, sounding a little noncommittal. “Baghlan.”

“She’s not showing up in U.S. military databases,” Riley says. “I don’t know what she was doing in Afghanistan, but it wasn’t working with the Army.”

She could be CIA or some other dark agency operator. But Mac knows they can’t afford to take that chance. He starts to say something, but Eileen cuts him off, glancing inside the room.

“I should know better than to drink straight whiskey when I’m not at home,” she says, frowning. “It goes right through me.” She gives him an apologetic smile. “I’ll be back in a minute.” She squeezes Mac’s hand and then walks off, and he freezes. Not because of the gesture, but because of what it told him. 

The callus on her hand. It matched Jack’s trigger finger perfectly, Mac’s all too familiar with that mark. And Mac’s not positive Eileen’s not an intelligence agent, but he can’t afford to take that chance.  _ She’s leaving to give herself a chance to shoot Collins, but coming back to the party will be her alibi. _ Mac has no idea how she plans to do this, but he’s pretty sure he knows the general idea of her game. 

_ She talked to me for two reasons. One, so it didn’t seem like she was worried about being noticed, and two, so I could give her an alibi. _ It fits. It fits too well. And if he’s made a mistake, well, he’s already embarrassed himself enough in front of her. 

“Stop!” Mac shouts.  _ If I draw attention to her, it ruins her plan. _ “Eileen!”

She turns around, and the dark glare in her eyes tells him he’s right. “Riley, Bozer, the redhead. Move in, now!” In the next second he’s covered the distance to her, only to be met with a hard kick that sends him sprawling. The assassin isn’t wearing heels, but it still hurt.

“Stop!” Riley shouts. Mac groans, sitting up enough to see that Riley’s holding a gun to the woman. “Don’t move, or I will shoot.” 

Mac sees the woman’s hand move toward her waist. “Riley, look out!”

“Don’t even think about it.” Jack says. He’s standing beside Mac, one hand holding his gun on the woman, the other reaching for Mac. “You okay, kid?”

“Yeah.” Mac struggles to his feet, staring at the woman. “It’s you, isn’t it?” He asks. “You’re the Banshee.” 

She does nothing more than glare at him balefully. Mac is dimly aware that people are shouting, screaming, staring. He feels like the room is spinning a little, and he’s not sure if that’s because he had the wind knocked out of him from that kick, or if he’s going to pass out. It’s too much, too fast, and he’s getting overwhelmed. 

Mac stands back, letting Jack and Riley pull the woman away. He feels like he’s the center of attention of the room now. He probably is.  _ I didn’t want to be anyone’s hero, I just wanted to do my job. _ Collins comes up and says something to him and shakes his hand, but Mac feels numb, unable to do anything. 

He just stands there until Jack comes back. “Hey kid, we got her. We can go now,” Jack says gently. Mac nods, and he doesn’t realize until they’re back on the jet that he was clenching his fists so tight his fingernails dug into his palms.

“Mac, are you okay?” Riley asks. 

Mac just nods. He will be. It’s just...his head is aching now, and he feels like he’s lost and confused and falling. He doesn’t know why, he’s been in much scarier, more chaotic situations without a problem. But there’s no telling when the trauma will decide to resurface. And he knows why. Because in those cold eyes he saw seconds before the woman’s foot connected with his chest, there was a reflection of Murdoc. 

* * *

PHOENIX INTERROGATION ROOM

Sam sits down across the table from the prisoner, who looks suspiciously comfortable in the room, even still in her rumpled evening dress with the handcuffs locking her wrists to the metal table. 

She drops a stack of files on the table. The Banshee doesn’t even flinch. She just glares cooly at Sam from under her messy red hair.  _ I know the type. I was the type. _ Sam knows this woman won’t talk unless she can find the chink in her armor and exploit it. But fortunately for her, she’s already got a pretty good idea of what it is.  _ Emotion makes a killer sloppy. Makes them leave trails they normally wouldn’t, loose ends they should have seen.  _

“I know a reluctant killer when I see one,” Cage says. 

“I think you must be mistaken, Ms. Cage.” Cuffs jingle against the metal table. 

“I think I’m not.” Sam says. “Eileen Brennan. You grew up in an orphanage in Dublin from the age of five. Parents were both killed in an IRA bombing. And then, when you turned eight, you vanished. Not just from the orphanage, but from the entire legal system. You became a ghost.” She turns over the file. “You only resurfaced eight years later. You weren’t making your signature phone calls then, but your technique was still the same.”  _ By the time she was sixteen, she was already a killer. _ Sam’s seen that in hot spots around the world, it’s not as shocking to her as it likely would be to the average civilian. But everything about child soldiers, in any conflict, makes her skin crawl.  _ I was at least old enough to know better, to make my own choice even if it was a dark one. But these children are groomed to become killers. _ And they can never really walk away. 

“You didn’t just learn to shoot like that on your own. Someone trained you. Someone who decided to make a group of war orphans his own personal child soldiers.” 

“His name is Dullahan. That’s all I was ever allowed to know,” Eileen says. “He gave me something to fight for. Something I thought I could believe in.”

“So you think you owe him your silence now?” Sam replies. “The IRA killed your family, and somehow, he managed to make you believe that more killing in their name would justify it. Am I wrong?” Sam isn’t sure an appeal to humanity will work on this woman. But she’s going to try. “Did you want to leave more lost children like you in your wake? How many more orphans are you responsible for?” _ I wouldn’t be this harsh with anyone else. But people like us, we lie to ourselves. And it takes a hard hit from the truth to smash those lies.  _ It’s how Roger Marton finally broke down Sam’s walls. 

“Maybe they’re better off,” Eileen says sullenly. 

“Like you?” Cage asks. “With nothing left to lose?” She thinks of the photo her sister Linsey sent her this morning. The ultrasound image of her new niece or nephew. _I cut myself off from my family because I was afraid to hurt them. It’s easier to lose yourself when there’s no one you trust, no one you think of as family._ But that doesn’t mean it’s right. “You’ve convinced yourself there’s some noble cause to what you’re doing, because that’s what _he _told you. But in the end, all you are is a killer for hire.” Sam shakes her head. “See, I know what you are because I’ve been what you are. I have blood on my hands too. I got caught in the same trap, made the same mistakes. I have killed and tortured because I was ordered to, and I convinced myself it was justified to bury the nightmares.” 

“You don’t know a bloody thing about me.” There’s no pretense of an American accent anymore. Sam knows that’s a win for her.  _ People revert to their mother tongue when they’re in pain because it’s too stressful to think about speaking any other language. And the same is true of accents. Under duress, they slip if they’re faked.  _ She’s gaining ground, Eileen is shaken in some way. Probably her comment about the children hit home. 

“You don’t want to admit you were manipulated, used. Neither did I.” Sam says. “But all Dullahan did was use you. He never cared, he never wanted to help you. All he wanted was for you to help him.”

“You think I’ll turn him in to get a deal, don’t you?” Eileen asks. “Well, unfortunately for you, I don’t know where he is. Even if I wanted to talk.”

“I’m well aware you don’t know your mentor’s whereabouts.” Cage can see the flicker of surprise cross the woman’s eyes, even though her face remains impassive. “I think you wanted Major Collins alive, not dead,” Sam says. She spreads out a folder on the table. “We found all of these newspaper clippings and printed articles in your car, in a folder hidden behind the dashboard. Clever hiding place, by the way. I actually prefer sliding it into the ceiling cover, but that’s just me.” 

Eileen purses her lips and nods slightly.  _ There’s a sort of code of trust between people like us. Sharing a secret hiding place like that means something. It doesn’t mean I’m on her side, but it means I’m giving her something. Revealing something I definitely didn’t have to. _

“I think you wanted to strike a deal with him.” Cage says. “Because you want his help.” She smiles. “You want him to help you find Dullahan.”  _ His contacts have information on every known terrorist. Dullahan must be on that list.  _ “I know for a fact you’ve been freelance for a few years now. Dullahan cut you loose after that job in London. And you want revenge,” Sam says. “You can help us bring him in. I can’t promise that it will get you much leniency, but maybe you’d sleep better at night knowing you put the man who was ready to kill an entire city block to prove a point behind bars.” 

“I don’t want Dullahan behind bars. I want to put a bullet through his skull,” Eileen says coldly.

“Trust me, no one understands that more than me,” Sam says. “But that’s not what we’re offering. Help us bring that man in to stand trial for his crimes. I assure you, he won’t walk away.” 

* * *

THE PHOENIX JET

EILEEN LOOKS LESS IMPRESSED THAN MAC WAS

Mac can’t quite suppress a shiver at the sight of Eileen boarding the Phoenix jet in a borrowed black tac suit (minus any weaponry) and cuffs. It’s not that she, out of all the people they’ve fought over the years, scares him that much. It’s that he knows once this op is over, once her usefulness has played out, she’s going to be sent right back to a cell. 

_ And there, but for the grace of God, go I. _ If Jack and Riley and Patty hadn’t bothered to really dig into his past, if they’d considered his skills applicable to only one mission, he might still be in prison now.  _ They could have taken me out and put me back. But they didn’t.  _

He’s aware his case was far different from Eileen’s. But on the surface, it wouldn’t have looked like it.  _ Both of us have the same kind of dossier, I’m sure. _ Broken families, traumatic pasts, and damage left in their wake. The only difference is, Eileen intended to kill. And there’s no way Jack and his team could have known that from a simple glance at Mac’s file.  _ Why did they bother to look into it at all? _

He thinks that secret might have died with Walsh. The man had wanted to use Mac as a pawn to lure James out of hiding, but there had to have been more to it than that. But now, Mac will never know. And it doesn’t really matter, in the end, because whatever Walsh intended, Mac has had nothing but good come out of the whole thing. He’s finally free of that living hell, he has a team who are his family, and he has a job he loves doing. 

Jack and Cage lead Eileen to a seat and lock her cuffs to the pole of the table. Jack puts a hand on his sidearm meaningfully, and Eileen glares at him. 

Matty steps up into the plane. She won’t be coming with them, but she’s doing her briefing here rather than the War Room this time. It’s rare to see Matty in person on the jet, and Mac wonders if she intended to have Eileen overhear this conversation as part of some long game.  _ She would know Eileen would be listening for anything she could get. Does she want her to hear something about this briefing?  _ Knowing Matty, no one will ever find out. 

“Major Collins was grateful enough to us for saving his life that he’s willing to cooperate fully with our requests for information,” Matty says. “He still thinks the Banshee was sent to kill him, and until this operation is over, I think it’s best we keep it that way.” Mac nods. “Thanks to intel Collins provided, we’ve learned that a man who matches the description of Dullahan that Eileen gave us has been captured by the Russians in a sting that rounded up a major weapons dealer. And Collins is not only offering us intel, he’s offering us one of his own people.” Matty smiles. “Who should be arriving any minute.” 

Mac hears tires on pavement outside, and the next minute a very familiar face appears at the top of the boarding stairs. “Long time, no see, guys.” Charlie chuckles. 

“Charlie, thanks for coming, man,” Jack says, shaking the man’s hand. Charlie returns the grip powerfully, Mac can see Jack wince a little. 

“We’ve had Dullahan on our radar for years,” Charlie says. “But he’s always slipped away from us in the past. Someone with inside information could be the key we need to crack this case and finally put that bastard away for good.” He glances at the redhead leaning sullenly back in her seat. “So she’s the Banshee, huh?”

“Yeah.” Mac knows it’s probably hard to believe that the young woman is one of the most notorious assassins in the world. But he’s well aware of what a life lived on the edge of horrors can do to someone.  _ Whether it was IRA violence or cartel wars, both of us grew up too fast. _ And Mac knows he was only an inch away from falling over the edge into what Eileen is.  _ If it hadn’t been for Bozer, and Pena, and Carlos, I could have become a cold-blooded killer. _ There were so many nights he felt like the problems he saw could be solved once and for all.  _ I wondered if it would really be so bad to kill someone who would kill others. _ But one of his friends always dragged him back from that edge. Eileen was surrounded by people who pushed her over it. 

“How come she gets tac gear?” Bozer whispers. 

Riley pulls him aside, but her whisper is loud enough for Mac to hear it. “Because Dullahan knows she’s a weak link in his chain. If he catches wind of her leading us to him, he’ll either have her taken down or do it himself. We’d prefer to have her alive to tell us what she knows.” 

“Good luck, team.” Matty says, and steps out of the jet. They prepare for takeoff, Bozer grabbing his headphones, Riley settling onto a couch, and Jack chatting with Charlie about some shared old memories of the Sandbox, and what’s new in their worlds since last Christmas. 

Mac considers asking if Jack wants to renew their game of War from the last flight; they both had two aces in their deck when they landed, so no decisive win could be declared. Then he glances at the woman by herself on the other side of the aisle, and decides he has something he needs to do first. 

Mac sits down across from Eileen. 

“So, I’m guessing your name isn’t actually Lucas,” she says, and it takes him a second to remember that she’s referring to his cover, at the party.  _ He _ barely remembers that. How did she?  _ She really likes being the first one in the conversation, doesn’t she? _

“No. It’s MacGyver.”

He barely gets a raised eyebrow.  _ Guess I shouldn’t expect one. _ It’s likely Eileen is aware she’s in no position to judge his past, if she’s heard of it, and being Irish, she’s probably run across much stranger names. “Well, MacGyver, what’s your job on this team?”

He frowns. “Why do you ask?”

“Well, I know your Aussie’s Psy Ops, the guy with the mohawk is weapons support, the woman I saw at the party is a hacker, judging by the way she’s working on that computer, and the guy over there works in the labs most of the time. So, I want to know, what do you do? Are you the one they send in to bat your eyelashes and look pretty and get people to talk?” 

Mac shivers.  _ Is that how she sees me? Is that how everyone sees me? Just a pretty boy who’s good for one thing? _

“Actually, this is what I do.” He sets the mangled paperclip he’s been playing with, twisted into the shape of a shamrock, down on the table. “I’m the troubleshooter. Solving problems we run into, as they come up, with whatever I have handy.”

“What problem did you just solve with that paperclip?” Eileen asks.

“Your opinion of me.” 

“Touche.” She smiles. “I like you, MacGyver. You’re a lot more than you seem to be.” 

He breathes a tiny shaky sigh of relief. He wasn’t sure that was going to work at all. And he guesses she’ll still reserve her judgment until she sees him in action, but at least hopefully she’ll think he’s more than what she first assumed. People always say it shouldn’t bother him, what other people think, but it does. Because what people think of him  _ can _ hurt him.

“You’re not exactly as advertised either,” Mac replies. 

“Because I let you catch me?” She asks. “The only reason I didn’t leave you nothing more than a memory at that gala is because I want Dullahan more than I want to be out of these cuffs right now.” 

Mac nods. She’s like Cage, or Murdoc. Doing everything with a purpose, even if it’s a twisted one. Nothing is left to chance, and they’re far too skilled to be forced or manipulated into anything they don’t want to do. 

“He called me his protege. Said I was going to be his masterpiece.” Eileen says shakily. “He turned me into a monster.”

“And now you have the chance to stop him,” Mac says. “I know a little of what that’s like.”  _ James wanted to manipulate me, Murdoc wanted to own me. _ And he wants both of them where they can’t do that to anyone else, ever again. 

He knows Eileen is playing him. Letting that much emotion into her voice was intentional. Cage was working on teaching him how to read people, how to run interrogations her way, using psychological tools to break a mark, rather than Jack’s more hands-on methods. 

But he also knows that sometimes, playing along gets you farther than calling the other person’s bluff. “I spent two years in a federal supermax. It was as bad as you think. All I could do was try to survive, however I had to.” 

Eileen frowns. “Guess we have more in common than I thought.” She raises an eyebrow. “Dullahan liked letting me do his dirty work in sniper nests and in more than a few bedrooms. A pretty face can get you almost anything you want if you’re willing to put out, can’t it?” 

Mac lets just enough of a flinch show to pique her curiosity and keep her talking.  _ If she thinks she has me at an emotional disadvantage, she’ll push it.  _ He was expecting her to ask if he’d killed.

“Do you tell yourself it’s just another kind of problem solving?” She asks. 

“It doesn’t matter what I tell myself, because thanks to them it doesn’t happen anymore,” Mac says, nodding back to the rest of his team.  _ We’ll just ignore the whole Murdoc thing for now.  _ That’s different, anyway. 

He isn’t really sure what he’s trying to accomplish. It’s not up to him whether Eileen is brought on as a permanent asset like he was. He’s not even sure she would want it if she was offered the chance. But he wants her to know that he, at least, doesn’t see a one-dimensional threat. He sees someone with a damaged past and a whole lot of hurt below the surface. Someone who’s worth reaching out to. 

Because before Jack and Riley came along, no one treated Mac like he was worth rescuing. Every time people looked at him, in the courtroom or behind bars, he knew they saw someone who deserved what he got. And two years of that had made him almost believe it. Eileen spent almost twenty years in Dullahan’s group. He can’t imagine how much damage that did.  _ Maybe she’s past saving, but I don’t believe in lost causes.  _

“So you’re going to offer me an out?” Eileen asks. “I see the carrot; so where’s the stick? Or is that the lifetime in prison waiting for me as soon as Dullahan’s in your hands?”

“What happens isn’t up to me,” Mac says. “It’s up to you.”  _ It’s hard to think that way when your whole life has been a series of events beyond your control _ . But since joining Phoenix, Mac’s path has been his to decide.  _ When they cleared my name, I could have gone anywhere. Done anything. Matty was willing to get me into MIT if that’s what I wanted.  _ Choosing to stay with the agency was the first thing in a long time Mac had control over. Really, the first thing since Mom’s death.  _ I was caught in the whirlpool that created for decades. But my team gave me what I needed to pull myself out. _ He stands up and walks away, ending the conversation on his own terms. 

Charlie’s dozing against a window, and Jack’s flipping through a paperback. When Mac sits down next to him, he can see that it’s not one of Jack’s beloved westerns. It’s one of Mac’s science-fiction books,  _ Seveneves _ . Jack sets it down and glances at Mac.

“You’ve got interesting taste in reading, kid. Hard sci fi is...a new thing for me. Haven’t quite made up my mind about it yet.”

“But you’re at least trying it. Kinda figured you’d steer clear of my bookshelf and stick with your old man books.” Mac says, pulling a Louis L’Amour novel out of his own bag. Jack promised him this was the first one in the  _ Sacketts  _ series, but Mac isn’t sure how much he trusts Jack’s memory of which book belongs where. Enough to grab it off the shelf before leaving, at least. 

“Stop calling me old man now, you’ll give Charlie too many ideas.” Jack chuckles. “He at least respects my earned wisdom.”

“Ha.” Mac rolls his eyes. 

“So...that was an interesting conversation over there,” Jack says.

“You heard it?”

“Enough to know what was happening. I didn’t know whether to step in or trust you,” Jack says. “I finally figured you’d get out of there if it was too much.”

Mac nods. “I know what I’m doing.” Besides, it doesn’t hurt as much to talk about all that anymore. It is what it is, and it happened, and thanks to Murdoc he’s well aware it could happen again. But that isn’t going to stop him from dealing with it. 

“Kiddo, if you had any idea how proud I am of you, your head would explode,” Jack says with a small smile. “You’re the toughest guy I know, and I know Delta Force soldiers and Navy SEALs.” Mac just smacks Jack’s shoulder, this is getting too sentimental and he doesn’t want to start crying in front of Eileen or Charlie. He opens his books. “Are you still willing to help me with any of these cowboy terms that go over my head?”

“Only if you’re willing to tell me what the heck all this sciency shit is.” 

* * *

RUSSIA

NOT RILEY’S FAVORITE PLACE ON EARTH

Riley’s experience with ops in Russia has been a mixed bag. Some are fairly straightforward, some have left her and Jack wounded and running for their lives, and pretty much all of them mean being miserably cold. She’s learned to dress in layers. Clearly, Bozer has no such experience.

After watching him shiver for twenty minutes in the back of the army truck Mac ‘borrowed’, bouncing down the roads toward the holding facility they’re heading for, Riley takes pity on him and gives him the hand-warmers out of her gloves. 

“Thanks,” Bozer says, tucking them into his own mittens. He’s alternating between glancing out the back of the canvas flap on the truck, and watching Eileen with sidelong glances. 

“You worried?” Riley asks.

“A little,” Bozer whispers back. “I always am. I mean, what if those papers don’t convince the guards? What if Eileen’s been playing us, and she wants to free Dullahan to get back in his good graces?”

“If she does double-cross us, Jack will put a bullet in her,” Riley says. “She’s good, but not as good as him. Or Cage.” 

“She’s like a real-life Black Widow,” Bozer says in awe.

“Yeah, I don’t think she’d appreciate that comparison,” Riley mumbles. 

Her comms come online, and Matty’s voice filters through. “Okay, team, you're just one klick out from the Russian base.”

“Copy that, Matty,” Jack says.

“Riley, you’ve double checked the forged Russian military documents for the prisoner transfer?” 

“Ran them through my software twice. They’re exact matches to the real deal.” 

“Good. Because you guys need to get in, ID Dullahan, grab him and get out of there fast.” Riley can hear Matty’s frown in her voice. “If you get caught, Collins is adamant that you all be disavowed. That’s the price for working with his intel.”

“Great. See, I knew there was a catch,” Jack says. “But I have no intentions of spending the rest of my life in some hole in the Siberian tundra. We’ll be careful.”

“Russian checkpoint's just around the next turn,” Riley says, consulting the map on her rig. “Jack, you know what to say?” 

“Da, comrade.” Jack’s fake accent is atrocious, but Riley knows that when the time comes, he’ll sound like he was born and raised in St. Petersburg. Jack is nothing if not professional when necessary. He just saves that for those necessary times. 

She, Charlie, Bozer, Mac, and Eileen are in the back of the truck. Cage and Jack are going to go in and grab Dullahan. The man is reportedly a master of several forms of hand to hand combat, and Jack and Cage are the most capable of taking him down if things go wrong. 

According to Eileen, Dullahan is a skilled sniper, an efficient and deadly bomb-maker, and impressive tactician. Riley sort of feels like they’re going up against Jack’s evil alter ego.  _ God help us if anything ever turned him. _ She doesn’t think she’d be alive to see it, as long as one of his kids was alive, Jack would stop himself from going completely dark, but she saw glimpses of what a Jack unrestrained by regulations and legalities would be like during their desperate search for Mac. Brutal interrogations, suicidal charges into gunfire, desperate last-ditch efforts to salvage evidence from dangerous locations. And if their search had ended with Mac dead, Riley has no doubt she would have witnessed a vicious, drawn-out, torturous murder. She still thinks she might. 

The truck jolts to a stop, and Riley leans forward slightly. 

“Something's wrong,” Cage says. 

“If this is a checkpoint, where are the guys doing the checking?” Jack asks. He parks the truck and jumps out, coming around to the back. “Hey, Eileen. I’d like your eyes up here, tell me if you notice someone’s signature.” She nods and jumps out of the back, awkwardly because of the cuffs on her hands. 

Riley climbs out with Charlie and Mac and Bozer, her gun raised carefully, covering the forest surrounding them. She doesn’t like how quiet it feels. It’s wrong, and it makes her shiver. 

“Somebody definitely used a bolt cutter on these chains,” Mac says, lifting the snapped chains that at one point must have formed a barrier across the road. 

“Hey, Charlie, I got four dead Russian soldiers over here,” Jack says. He’s bent over the bloodied bodies. “Someone put a lot of holes in them.”

“Matty, somebody cleared out this checkpoint,” Cage says, and there’s concern in her eyes. “Someone else got here first.” 

There’s a loud boom that shakes the ground, and Riley instinctively ducks behind the truck and covers her head. She sees Charlie, Jack, and Cage doing the same, Jack pulling Eileen down with him. Bozer swivels his head like a puppy, and Mac flinches, hands going to his ears. He’s hypersensitive to concussive blasts now, after what happened at that house with James. 

“That cracking sound...what  _ was _ that?” Bozer asks. 

“It's got to be high explosives,” Cage says. 

“Yeah, I think it was an ANFO bomb,” Charlie replies

“You could tell by the sound?” Bozer asks.

“Sound, smell, smoke. A lot of things help identify a bomb,” Charlie replies. He shakes his head. “ANFO bombs are Ammonium Nitrate Fuel Oil devices. They're big and powerful. Used in rock quarries, coal mines…”

“Or breaking someone out of a secure military installation,” Mac adds.

Matty sighs. “Mac’s right. A massive explosion just took out the north wall of the Russian base. Now there's two vehicles heading right for you. Guys, get to cover.”

“We can stop them here,” Mac says. He’s unhooking the chains and starting to lay them out in an X shape on the road, probably making a trap for the vehicle axles.

“Too bad no one has a pillow,” Jack mutters. “One of those suckers took my truck out on the way home to the ranch one time. Messed everything up worse’n an armadillo. I spent two hours cuttin’ ‘er out of my drivetrain.”

“Would a jacket work?” Bozer asks.

“Keep that,” Mac says. He’s making a few final adjustments to his chain trap. “When this takes out the first truck, it should block the road. And if they get past that, there’s our truck.”   
“You should have visual in three, two…” Matty says.

“Cover!” Jack shouts, grabbing Mac and bodily dragging him away from his work. “That’s good enough, we gotta go!” 

Riley dives behind a stand of trees as the trucks rumble into view. Except they’re not both trucks. The first vehicle looks like their military transport. The second one is a jeep. 

Riley watches as the truck hits the chains, tangles up, and veers off the road to slam into a tree. But the jeep just speeds past it, and as it does, Riley catches a glimpse of a man in the back, sitting with his back to the rollbar, an automatic rifle over his knees. She hears a snarl beside her, and a thrashing sound. Eileen is struggling with Jack’s gun, trying to pull it out of its holster. 

“That’s him!” She hisses. 

“Stop!” Jack pushes her hands away and pins her. “Cage, do you have a shot?”

“Taking it now.”

The jeep is still swerving wildly, tires caught in the mud and wet grass edging the road, and the shot pings off the metal rollbar. The man in the back ducks, and Eileen starts cursing in what Riley can only assume is Gaelic. 

“I could have shot him.” She snarls, still fighting Jack’s hold. “I’ve hit harder targets. He’d be dead now.”

“And we might be too. There is no way you’re getting your hands on any weapon.” Riley knows Jack takes extra precautions with his holsters. Even though it looks like he can draw his weapons without any restriction, there’s actually a complex series of finger-released failsafes, even more now that Mac is helping design Phoenix tac gear. Eileen never had a chance. But Riley’s not sure Charlie would have had the same protections.  _ Good thing she wasn’t next to him. _

Riley stands up, watching as the jeep fishtails around their own truck and races away down the road. Cage sighs, walking up and lowering her gun to replace it in her thigh holster. “Emptied a mag trying to get his tires, or the driver. I think I grazed someone, but it doesn’t matter. They’re long gone.”

Riley shades her eyes, glancing after the truck. “I really need to work on making some kind of tracking bullets.”

“Might not need them,” Jack says. “We got a survivor in here.” He yanks open the door of the wrecked truck, pulling out a guy with bloodied, sandy hair and a faked Russian military uniform. 

“That's Patrick Quinn, a member of the IRA,” Eileen says, glaring down at the unconscious man. 

“I got a bag full of devices back here,” Charlie says. “These guys came loaded for bear. We’re lucky we didn’t all get blown to hell when that truck crashed.”

“I'm willing to bet Dullahan will not be in Russia for very long,” Jack says. “Which means we need to get you talking fast.” He kicks the man on the ground, and his eyes fly open. “All right, Patrick, tell us where you were taking Dullahan, or I'll hand you over to the Russians. Yeah, bet they'll be real excited to meet the man who just bombed one of their army installations.”

A string of totally unintelligible gibberish pours out of the man’s mouth, but Riley gets the general idea anyway.  _ Go to hell sounds kind of the same in any language.  _

“I'm sorry, what was that? Elvish?” Bozer asks.

“It's Irish,” Eileen says

“Yeah, well, that’s real helpful, seeing as I don’t exactly trust you right now.” Jack says. “Mac, any chance you speak Gaelic?” 

Mac just glowers at him. 

“Well, if he doesn't speak English, it's gonna be hard to get any useful information out of him,” Charlie says. 

“Oh, he speaks English,” Eileen mutters. “Trust me.” She’s glaring at him, and he’s watching her with a look Riley knows all too well, one she’s had turned on her on more than one op, and on more than one morning jog. There’s clearly a history between them, one Riley is pretty sure she can guess at. 

Just like relationships between partnered agents, terror cells can have the same dynamic, where falling into bed together is a way to forget close calls and bad dreams. She shakes off the thought of Nick Carpenter and what she’d like to do to him and tries to focus on the problem at hand.  _ I’ve got someone good now.  _ She’s sure Billy will have blown up her phone by the time they get back, she hasn’t seen him since before they left for London. 

Mac staggers, leaning against the side of the truck, a hand pressed to his leg. Jack grabs for him, helping him sit down on the twisted running board. “Kiddo, you okay?”

Mac shakes his head, squinting. “Knee’s acting up.” 

“From when I pulled you down? Sorry, kiddo.” Jack says, starting to roll up Mac’s pantleg. “Let’s get a look.” 

“Patrick, I need you to cooperate,” Cage says. “Or this is going to get a lot worse for you.”

Riley notices, a second too late, that Eileen’s backed up. Everyone else was so focused on Patrick and Mac...

In a split second, Eileen shoves Charlie out of the way, grabs a small handheld device, and there’s a click and whirr that tells Riley she’s armed it. 

“Get back! Everyone get back!” Riley shouts, drawing her gun and training it on the assassin. “Put down the bomb or I’ll shoot!” Jack is pulling Mac to his feet and tugging him backward, Bozer is stepping back beside them, and Cage and Charlie have their weapons at the ready too. 

Eileen doesn’t seem to be paying attention to any of it. She steps up in front of Quinn, her hands clenched around the small bomb. The man turns slightly, and Eileen sweeps his feet out from under him with one of her own, and in a single fluid movement crashes down with her knee in his chest, shoving the bomb into the man’s mouth that’s opened in a cry of pain. 

“Patrick, you're gonna tell me where you were taking Dullahan. Or I'm gonna turn you into puzzle pieces.”

“All right, all right, I'll talk, I'll talk!” Quinn’s voice is garbled, coming out around the explosive, but there’s genuine fear. Eileen pulls the bomb back out of his mouth and raises an eyebrow. “He’s at a warehouse! I can give you the address!”

“Good, you’d better.” Eileen stands up, handing the bomb to Charlie. “I’m assuming you can disarm this before the timer goes down to zero. Otherwise, we should probably run like hell.” 

Riley isn’t sure what she just witnessed. But she can’t deny that it worked. And she’s still trying to figure it out when they’re rattling over the bumpy roads toward the location Quinn gave them. She looks up across the truck bed at Eileen. The assassin seems totally composed and calm, as if she didn’t almost just blow herself and another man up half an hour ago.  _ She was willing to bet her life on him caving. _ Granted, Riley’s well aware the woman had known Quinn, probably knew his pressure points and what would make him crack. Still, that was something Riley would have expected more from Jack or Patty than someone like Eileen.  _ She struck me as the self-interested type. The kind who wouldn’t risk her life for something like that. But maybe she wants Dullahan more than any of us think. _ Riley isn’t sure she bought the whole sob story. But she’s starting to think more of it was true than she was willing to believe. 

Matty sounds as shaken as Riley feels. “Phoenix agents picked up Quinn where you left him. And I'm glad you were able to disable that device, Charlie. That’s not exactly standard interrogation practice for the Phoenix.”

“Nope. But it was effective,” Jack says.

Matty sighs. “And if you attempt to use it, Dalton, I will have you court-martialed.”

“Oh, come on, even if it’s a fake bomb? Bet Mac could make a convincing fake. Right, Mac?”

“Dalton, if I hear so much as one suggestion that you’ve done anything like this, you won’t be laughing any longer.” 

* * *

“This is the warehouse Quinn said they were bringing Dullahan to.” Riley looks up as her rig pings. Jack doesn’t trust this place not to be a giant trap. In fact, it practically screams something wrong. The doors are wide open and the building looks abandoned, empty, and safe. Which automatically means it’s not. 

“Looks empty,” Cage says. “But I don’t like the clear lines of sniper sight.”

“Riley, we got any signals coming or going?”

No, but thermal is going nuts. Guys, looks at this.” Riley steps out of the back of their vehicle, setting her rig on the hood. “The whole place is lit up like a Christmas tree.” 

Mac takes a deep shaking breath, glancing from the screen to the building. 

“What is it, Mac?” Jack asks. 

“The building is on fire,” Mac says. 

“I can feel heat, but I don't see any fire,” Bozer replies. 

“It's a methanol fire,” Mac says, sniffing the air. “It burns blue. It's almost invisible in the daylight.”

Charlie nods in understanding. “Invisible and nearly smokeless. No smoke means no one notices and calls the fire department.”

“Dullahan must be burning whatever he left behind to cover his tracks,” Jack says. “Everybody stay back, Riley, Cage, keep an eye on our guest. Charlie and Mac and I will go check.” But the closer they get to the building, the more apparent it is that they’re not going to be able to get inside. The heat is too strong, and the flames are forming a wall that Jack can’t tell the extent of. 

“Hey Mac, any chance you could build a giant fire extinguisher?” Jack asks, only half-joking. If they lose what’s in that warehouse, they lose Dullahan. Again. And Jack wants to see that bastard bleed.  _ He crossed a line, taking children. Orphans.  _

Mac glances at the building across the street. “You know, I think I could.” He runs over to a truck parked outside it, inspecting the canisters on it. “CO2. I can use this.”

“Okay, so you’re gonna need something to work as a pump now, right?” Jack says. “How bout the coolant system from the van? Like that time with the Coltons?”

“Oh, I won’t need a pump for this. Grab two of those and follow me.” 

Jack lugs the pair of tanks back to a spot in front of the blaze. It’s still weird watching a fire he can barely see consume all the stuff in that building. 

Mac looks from the tanks to the fire. “Jack, I need you and Charlie to undo that hydrant over there. Just let it run and flood the ground.” Jack frowns, but nods.  _ Maybe this kind of fire will go out if he can get water underneath it? _ The kid’s a genius, he must know what he’s doing. 

“You sure we can’t spray the water right on it?”

“Only if we want to...you know what, never mind, I just need it.” Mac hasn’t been this short with Jack in a long time, not since he started responding to the medication he’s been taking that helps regulate the mood swings. But Jack can’t remember if they had time to follow the dosage regimen in London. He won’t hold the spike of anger against the kid anyway. 

He turns around and starts fighting with the hydrant mechanism. This one’s old, it looks like it will need both him and Charlie to get it open. 

The two of them are prying at it when Jack hears a bang. He looks up just in time to see Mac walking into the wall of flames.    
“What the hell?” Jack shouts, dropping what he’s doing just as the handle of the hydrant finally gives and water gushes out, covering his shoes. Mac looks at him sadly from the other side of the wavering, pale blue glow, and flings another one of the canisters into the blaze, creating a sort of temporary pocket of safety. 

“What is he doing?” Bozer asks. 

Jack wishes he didn’t know. “Fire needs oxygen to burn. The CO2 will force the oxygen out of the room. He's making a path through the fire.”

“That's insane,” Charlie says, stepping up beside him. 

“That's Mac.”

“He's burning barrels of industrial chemicals in there. They could go up at any second,” Charlie says. Jack watches, barely breathing, as Mac snatches a stack of smoldering papers off a table and turns. He flings his last canister and steps forward. But the fire is stronger now, and the blast isn’t enough. Jack can see the fear on Mac’s face, and he turns on his heel, races back to the truck holding the canisters, and rushes back, flinging one into the flames like he saw Mac do, following it in, grabbing the kid and yanking him back out to safety just as the fire closes in again with a whoosh. 

Mac’s clothes are smoking, and in a few places Jack can actually see flames. He pushes Mac to the ground, rolling him from side to side in the few inches of water from the hydrant, and Charlie and Bozer both rush forward to try to help. 

Mac cringes away from the hands patting out the flames licking on his tac gear. Jack bends down closer to him, hoping to reassure him that all they’re here to do is help. He knows how Mac feels about being touched when he’s on the ground. But he also knows he doesn’t want his kid to be suffering from burns again. 

“You okay, kiddo?” He can smell scorched hair, and burned rubber from Mac’s shoe soles, but aside from some reddened patches where his clothes have been burned, Mac’s skin looks intact. “Here, let me see those papers. And your hands.” He has nightmares about what happened in New Orleans. About Mac’s hands being burnt so much worse than they really were. About the kid spending the rest of his life with useless, mangled stumps of them. He forces the sickening thought out of his mind before it can impose itself on the real Mac shivering on the pavement. 

Mac stands up slowly, handing the papers over to Charlie, and then holding out his hands. Jack sighs in relief when he sees only a few darker pink blotches.  _ No worse than if he’d touched the rack in an oven by mistake. _

Not that that’s something Mac is likely to have much experience with. Jack has been doing most of the cooking, although he’s slowly but surely training Mac in some of the basics. They’ve had good luck with chili and fried cornbread, but baking is another matter entirely. Although, in Mac’s defense, all Grammaw’s recipes are very unscientific. Pinches, dashes, and ‘till it looks/tastes right’ does not compute well into Mac’s love of formulas.  _ He’s so good at improvising in every situation but the kitchen.  _ Maybe they ought to start with the measured recipes in the cookbook first. 

He didn’t really understand how Mac was having so much trouble with something that’s on the same principle as most of his other pastimes, until Mac glumly watched a pot of noodles boiling over and mumbled, “James would have killed me for the smell in here now.” And suddenly it all made sense.  _ The kid was probably seven or eight years old, damn it. And instead of helping him, James yelled at him for making a mess, and made him stop. _ He took away Mac’s confidence about that skill, and the kid still thinks he can’t do it. 

Jack feels sick every time he thinks about the damage James did to an impressionable kid. He wants to kill the man for it, so he can understand Eileen’s determined rage.  _ Dullahan twisted her up. She was just a kid, and he turned her into a killer.  _ Jack’s not sure who that man should be more afraid of.  _ Because the way it sounded, she wasn’t the only war orphan he took for his child army.  _ Jack wants to get his hands on the bastard and kill him slowly. 

“These are pretty badly burned, but they’re legible enough for me to see what it is,” Charlie says. “These are shipping documents. They're sending thousands of gallons of chemicals somewhere. The address has burned off these pages. All I have is a name.”

“Let me see,” Eileen says. She glances at the papers, then at the team. “He’s one of our men in Paris. Dullahan’s going to Paris.”

“Then that’s where we’re headed,” Riley says. “Any chance you know where he’d keep those chemicals?”

Eileen nods. “There’s a large building near the center of the city. The IRA owns it under a false name. It’s the only place we have in Paris big enough to store the amount he’s shipping.” 

“Ok,” Mac says, then bends over coughing harshly. 

Jack frowns. “You breathe any o’ that air?”  _ He could have scorched his lungs. _ Jack knows that’s a potential killer.  _ If that happened to him, he probably doesn’t stand a chance. _

“Held my breath till I got out,” Mac whispers. “Kept my eyes mostly closed too.” 

“You’re crazy, you know that, kid?” Jack asks. “If you ever do something that crazy again, I’ll kill you myself.” 

“Nothing else was fast enough,” Mac says weakly, between gasping inhales. 

“And it wasn’t worth you risking your life,” Jack replies. He can feel Mac trembling, and he can’t tell if it’s from suppressed coughing or from his sodden clothes; the water from that hydrant was icy. Jack just pulls him a little closer, running his fingers over Mac’s back gently. “Don’t do that again, you hear me?”

Mac just nods. 

* * *

PARIS

NOT THE PRETTY PART

“This is it.” Eileen says, pointing up to the building as the team parks their van outside. Bozer frowns, looking at the crumbling, grimy facade.  _ I’m still not sure she’s not just leading us into an elaborate trap.  _ Twice now they’ve relied on nothing more than her word, whether it was translating Quinn’s Irish or directing them to this place based on a name on shipping manifests. Bozer knows Cage already vetted the assassin, but he has a hard time believing someone like the Banshee is cooperating so readily. It feels wrong in a way he can’t quite put his finger on. 

“A machine shop?” Is his only voiced suspicion. 

Charlie nods. “Bomb makers like to hide their workshops in places where the sound of metal work and the smell of chemicals won't seem out of place. Auto body shops, foundries, chemical plants. Dullahan’s local contact is probably the one who assembled this bomb.” 

Eileen nods. “We call him Le Loup. He’s a former UN Peacekeeper, worked in quite a few hotspots. He knows his way around anything that explodes.”

“But why Paris? What's the target?” Jack asks.

“Your guess is as good as mine,” Eileen replies. “I haven’t been part of his plans since he cut me off three years ago.”

Mac carefully picks the lock on the building, and the team steps inside. Bozer watches Mac and Charlie check for bomb traps, tripwires on the doors, or anything that could hide a pressure sensor. But the building is empty. Too empty.

Bozer turns around to look at Eileen.  _ She led us to a dead end. Gave Dullahan plenty of time to get away to wherever it is he was really going. I knew we should never have trusted her. _

It looks like Jack’s had the same idea, he’s glaring at the red-haired woman with barely suppressed fury. “If this is where Dullahan sent the chemicals, where are they?”

“I don’t know. I swear, I don’t know. They should be here,” Eileen says. “Maybe the bombs are already finished.”

“And maybe you’re taking us all over europe on a wild goose chase, helping Dullahan get away with his master plan.” Jack pins Eileen’s shoulder to the wall, towering over her. “So, instead of finding Dullahan, we find an abandoned building and a dead end. Where’s his real target? London? Berlin? Dublin?”

“I told you the truth. Everything I know. He sent the chemicals to Le Loup, and this is his workshop.”

“So where the hell are they?” Jack asks again.

“Guys!” Mac calls. He’s kneeling on the floor, tugging at a piece of metal grating.

“Uh, Mac? What are you doing?” Bozer asks. 

Mac just leans over closer to the opening. “Listen. You hear that?”

“What is that?” Charlie asks. Bozer can hear it now too, a dull sound of something moving.

“That is where Le Loup and Dullahan took the chemicals. This building sits over one of the main service tunnels in the Paris catacombs.”

Jack lets go of Eileen, and she shakes her shoulders with a glare. 

“Bozer, call Paris police, tell them what we found here,” Jack says, walking over to help Mac with the grating. “Then call Matty and bring her up to speed. Mac, Charlie, Riley, Cage, you're with me. Eileen, you’re coming down with us; I want your eyes on this. But if you so much as try to take my gun again, you’re going to have more of the bullets from it than you bargained for. 

Charlie frowns. “Jack, we don't know how long Dullahan’s man’s been down there. He's had time to nest, make traps. Need to make sure we're prepared for anything.”

Bozer pulls out his phone. He doesn’t like this. Not at all. But there’s not a thing he can do about it.  _ I don’t trust her. But they all do.  _ He just hopes his instincts, this time, are wrong. 

* * *

Mac reaches into his pocket and pulls out a handful of hair ties. Jack grins. The kid’s grown his hair out to help hide the neck scars, but it does tend to get in his way in the lab. He’s started pulling it back with some of Riley’s ponytail holders, and she gave him a handful to keep in his pockets with the paperclips. Jack would never tell the kid to his face, but watching him bent over a bunch of test tubes with his hair pulled back like that makes him look like an amusing combination of nerd and hipster college kid. 

Mac rummages through some of the trash on the floor, digging out an old can and a thick bolt. Jack watches him mumble to himself as he assembles some sort of little device that looks a little like the toy spool tanks Jack used to build as a kid. 

“We’ll use this to check the hall,” Mac says. “I think I’m ready.”

Jack watches as Mac rolls the can to the end of the hallway, then grins when it starts returning to the little group. 

Charlie reaches down and wipes a cloth covered in liquid over the canister. Jack’s familiar with this stuff, it’s what Mac cooked up in his kitchen that time they got trapped in his own house by the Ghost. Charlie looks up and nods. “Okay, no chemical reaction. No trip wires, no pressure plates. Hall is free of traps.”

Cage frowns. “I know I watched you build that thing, Mac, but I don't know what it does.”

Mac grins. “It's called a comeback can. It uses potential and kinetic energy; we learned about it from Mr. Ericson in my fifth grade class.”

“And now you're using it to search for bombs from a safe distance. That's ingenious, Mac,” Charlie says.

“And badass,” Riley says. “Who knew science experiments really were going to come in handy in the future? I thought that was all just teacher BS.”

Bozer pops his head in through the gap where the grating used to be. “Brought the police up to speed. They're calling in additional units to start searching the city for possible incendiary devices. How's it going down there?” 

“Slow. We have to be careful looking for traps,” Mac replies. “We’ll keep you up to date.”

“These catacombs are massive,” Riley says, consulting her rig. “Spread out under the entire city. Dullahan could be anywhere.”

“Do you have any idea of a potential target?” Charlie asks.

“Not yet. Eileen? Any of these places ring a bell?”

“I don’t know Paris. Never worked this side of the channel till I went freelance,” Eileen replies. “I don’t know what Dullahan had planned over here.” 

“Oh, got a reaction,” Charlie says suddenly, holding up Mac’s can and his now-black rag. A lotta nitrogen particles in the air down this hall. Everybody, move slow. Keep your eye open for traps.”

“Wiring's new,” Charlie says as they approach a small door that leads off to the right. “Door is definitely rigged.” He makes quick work of disarming it; clearly he hasn’t lost any of his touch since the Sandbox. 

He pushes open the door, and the group steps into a decent-sized room lined with lockers, workbenches, bombmakers’ tools, and a couple thin mattresses pushed against a wall

“Everybody, fan out,” Jack says. “Be careful of what you touch. Some of these crazy sons of bitches like to rig their own places.” He almost lost Charlie to a guy who did that in the Sandbox.  _ We found his workshop, figured all we had to worry about was the devices on the tables. And then Charlie stumbled onto a tripwire.  _

The team roams around the room, carefully checking inside the lockers and through the stacks of papers on some of the tables. Charlie pulls a box out of a locker, Riley begins scanning a couple external hard drives for safety before she plugs them into her rig, and Cage rifles through the papers on the desks. Mac sorts through some of the tools and compontents. If they know what kind of a bomb they’re looking for, and how large, they might be able to narrow down the target list a little. 

Cage is the first one to find something worth looking into. She digs a battered ring binder out from a heap of documents and begins flipping through it. Jack hears a soft gasp from her direction, and turns to see what it is she’s got. 

“This is like a who’s who of international terrorists and assassins,” Cage says, holding up the binder. “Dullahan didn’t just keep a record of his own people. These are from all over the world, and he kept it up to date.” She holds out a page. It’s her own former name and photo, with “Inactive” scrawled across the middle of the paper.

“And check this out. All these tapes and CDs are marked with names and dates,” Charlie says, holding one up. “This was the assassination of a Chinese dissention movement leader, his name is on the top, the assassin’s is on the bottom.”

“Eileen, you know anything about these?” Jack asks.

“He liked to learn from others’ successes and failures,” Eileen replies. “He taught us by showing us what had worked and what hadn’t for other people in the same line of work. I recognize some of those tapes, he’d show one and ask us what the killer did right, and what they did wrong.”

“So this is like Murder 101?” Jack says, shaking his head. 

“There’s a lot of tapes in here,” Charlie says. “They date back to the early eighties. Some of these are unsolved cases my division has open on the books. This could be the key to almost twenty terror attacks that no one ever claimed credit for.” 

“Alright, let’s grab those and get out of here,” Jack says. “Looks like whatever Dullahan and Le Loup were planning, they’re already on their way to do it.” Regrouping and trying to figure out the target seems like their best choice of action now.  _ Maybe something on one of those hard drives will help us. Or maybe some of those tapes are of Paris locations he considered hitting. _ It’s a long shot, but that’s all they’ve got. 

That’s when he hears the click. Riley looks up at him, eyes wide, and then Jack is flung to the door in an explosion of rubble, noise, and a stunning shockwave that turns his world upside down and then black. 

* * *

SOMEWHERE UNDER PARIS

IT’S PROBABLY BOZER’S FAULT MAC’S FIRST WAKING THOUGHT IS A BROADWAY SHOW TUNE

Mac takes a single, shuddering breath, trying to assess the extent of the damage. He was further from the door than the others when Riley accidentally triggered the pressure plate. There wasn’t time to get out, so he settled for throwing himself behind a locker and pulling the metal box in front of him the best he could.

It wasn’t a lot of protection. He can’s hear anything but a stunned ringing, his head is pounding, and every cough of dusty air makes his chest constrict painfully.

“Jack?” Mac whispers weakly. “Jack, where are you?” He feels over the rubble, fingers fumbling for any sign that Jack survived the explosion.  _ Jack has to be okay. He has to be. _ “Jack?” The explosion must have knocked out his comms, either that or deafened him too much to hear any reply. 

Everything hurts. Mac’s chest feels like an elephant stepped on it, his bones feel rattled, and everything just  _ hurts. _ He was much, much too close to that blast. Even with the cabinet as protection, he’s battered and aching and definitely has a concussion, which is bad. Really bad.

He tries to push himself back to his feet, but the motion sends a spike of pain through his head and he gasps, falling back against the wall. It hurts  _ so much. _ He wants it to stop...

He blames the pain for the fact that he doesn’t notice the face materializing out of the dust and smoke until it’s right in front of him. And for the fact that he doesn’t even have the presence of mind to duck when a fist swings toward his face.

* * *

“Does anyone copy?” Charlie asks. His ear’s ringing from the sound of the explosion, and he can barely breathe from the dust in the air.  _ How big was that? And are any of them still alive? _

“This is Riley,” A voice comes through, only to be cut off by a hacking cough. “I’m okay. My leg’s pinned but I don’t think it’s broken.”

“Cage here. I’m on my way to Riley.”

“This is Dalton, I’m good. Mac, you copy? Mac?” Jack’s voice is rising, a frantic panic edging it. Charlie knows that fear. He’s heard it before. Like the slow drift back to consciousness after their Humvee flipped, or the time he was blown out of a second story window by a bomb he didn’t defuse in time. That’s the sound Jack’s voice gets when he’s terrified that he’s lost a member of his team. One of his family. 

“Who’s got Eileen?” Charlie asks suddenly. All the team are accounted for but Mac and her.  _ What if she did something to him? _ So far, the ex IRA assassin has been cooperative, but Charlie’s worked with all too many informants who have turned when the chance presents itself. Eileen may have grabbed Mac and run. 

“She was closest to you,” Cage says. “I didn’t see much before the place blew, but I don’t think she was still inside.” 

Jack and Riley don’t say a thing. Riley’s probably in too much pain, judging from the smothered gasps Charlie can hear through comms, and Jack has just one focus. Mac.

Charlie turns at the sound of something shifting beside him. Eileen is just barely visible in the dusty light, pushing a fallen chunk of stone off her body.

Charlie kneels next to her. He might not trust the woman, but he doesn’t want to see her die on internal injury either. 

“You intact?”

“I’ll live,” She replies, with a tone that suggests she’s survived worse. Charlie doesn’t doubt it. Handmade IEDs like the IRA is fond of have a nasty habit of going off at the wrong time. He’d be surprised if this is the first time Eileen was caught in a blast. 

She staggers to her feet just as Charlie hears a sharp cry of pain rip through the comm line.

“I’ve got Riley, she’s stable but she’s not going far on that leg,” Cage says. “I’ll get her topside to medical attention. I think I can see a clear way out of here for us, but I can’t even get back to you, Jack, much less Charlie.” 

Jack replies with nothing more than a straining grunt. Charlie doesn’t need to see him to know that the man is tossing rubble aside with his bare hands, digging his way to Mac if need be. It’s deeply concerning that Mac hasn’t responded. Because if he was close enough to the blast to have his comm knocked out, he was also close enough to be seriously injured.

Charlie hears a sharp intake of breath from Jack, a worried sound he doesn’t like. 

“I got inside, but Mac’s not there. He’s not there and there’s some kinda hole in the wall behind one o’ the cabinets. Dullhan had an escape tunnel, he mighta been right there the whole damn time.” 

“Jack, hold your position, I’m coming to you,” Charlie says. 

“No time. They have Mac, Charlie.” 

Charlie already knew arguing was a lost cause. But he had to try. Because the thought of Jack chasing down Dullahan and Le Loup in those tunnels, by himself, clearly wounded if his breathing is any indication, is concerning.  _ He’s going to get himself killed. _

He’s so focused on how to get to Jack that he misses the sound of something metallic clattering behind him. Charlie turns, but he’s a second too slow. Something slams into his arm, and knocks him backward onto the floor. And when he looks up, the Banshee is gone. And so is his sidearm.  _ Damn it! _

* * *

Riley grimaces as the medical team finishes adjusting the boot on her leg. She has to go to the hospital for x-rays, they suspect a cracked tibia, but she’s refused to leave until Mac is back safe. She can’t lay in a bed not doing anything. 

She tries not to think about how the last time Mac vanished, she was in Phoenix medical with a bullet in her stomach, unable to help with the search at all until she’d healed enough to be discharged.  _ It was its own form of torture. Mac was missing, in danger, and there was absolutely nothing I could do to help. _ She knows that’s not totally true, she was running sat searches and combing Friar, but she  _ felt  _ helpless. 

Charlie is sitting on the other ambulance, getting his arm bandaged from a nasty altercation with some rebar. Riley can tell he doesn’t want to talk to anyone right now, he’s feeling guilty about letting Eileen get the jump on him. Now she and Mac are both in the wind. But Riley is much more worried about Mac than whatever Eileen is going to do.  _ I sound a lot like Jack. _

They don’t even know where Jack is. He shut his comms off and went dark as soon as Matty tried to order him back, Riley can’t even track him. She knows he doesn’t want to be found. Not until he’s killed Dullahan for laying a hand on Mac.  _ We won’t see him until the job is done. _

“What can I do to help, Matty?” She asks as soon as the medics step aside. 

“Try and narrow down Dullahan’s target in the city. I’ve been in contact with MI6 and I have a list of all their known IRA targets cross-referenced with any activity in Paris. Your eyes on it would help.”

Riley opens her rig and pulls up the file Matty just sent. She scrolls through the targets and events, noting any flagged ones until one in particular catches her eye.

“Owen Douglas. He's giving a speech at the French National Assembly building.”

“He’s about to become Prime Minister of England. Sounds like the perfect target for IRA terrorists,” Cage says. 

“Get British Protection Command on the phone right now,” Matty says. “Bozer, you’re going to be our relay man. Keep them informed of everything we’re doing. Cage, and Charlie if you feel up to it, get to Douglas as fast as you can, and don’t leave his side. Our best chance of finding Dullahan, and Mac, is him.” 

“Two bombs just went off in the city,” Riley says, watching her screen light up with incoming police reports. She breathes a shaky sigh of relief when she reads a couple of the bulletins. “None of them were detonated at the National Assembly building.”

“I thought that was Dullahan’s target,” Bozer says. 

“No. He’s following exactly the pattern he taught Eileen,” Cage says. “Forcing a response. In the event of an attack, Dullahan knows that Douglas's protection detail would immediately move him to a safe location in the city.”

“So these bombs weren't detonated to kill Douglas, but to move him to a specific location,” Charlie says, reaching for the backup gun Riley hands him. She still has the little one in her ankle holster, but being benched like this, she doesn’t need her sidearm as much as she’s sure Charlie will. 

“We need to know where the British safe house is, because I think that's where we're gonna find Dullahan,” Cage says. 

“I'll make a call,” Matty replies. “Riley, stay with the van. We’ll let you know what we find. Keep an eye on the route Douglas’s team are taking through the city. The bombs might have been a smoke screen, and Dullahan might have a different plan in mind for taking Douglas out.” Riley nods, hearing what Matty isn’t saying.  _ Eileen could have been working with him the whole time, and right now be on a rooftop with a sniper rifle. _

Watching Charlie and Cage leave without her is frustrating, and she can tell Bozer feels the same way. She googles the chemical components from the shipping manifests, just for something to do. They’re impressive, the kind of thing she knows Mac would geek out over. And combined, they form one of the most powerful explosives in the world. 

_ A bomb made from them wouldn’t have to be directly in the safehouse to get the job done.  _ The realization strikes her fast and hard.  _ We’re looking in the wrong place. _

“Bozer, call Cage and Charlie. Tell them the bomb probably won’t be at the house itself.”

She grabs her rig and jumps to her feet, only to gasp and stumble in pain, catching herself on the side of the van.  _ I hate leg injuries. _

“Riley, where are you going?”

“We don’t have time to wait for Cage and Charlie to reroute, and besides, one of them still has to stick with Douglas in case the bomb is a decoy. Bozer, drive.” 

“How are you going to find it?” Bozer asks, buckling himself in the driver’s seat.

“By thinking like a bomb maker.” Riley pulls up the area maps, overlaying them with the catacomb tunnels. “Matty, please tell me you have the location of the safe house.”

“I do.” Riley plugs it into her rig and begins scanning the area. A house less than a block away attracts her attention. All the houses in this area are old and ramshackle, the perfect location for a nondescript safehouse, but this one is abandoned and better yet, sits right on top of a catacomb junction. A space large enough for Dullahan’s bomb. 

“That’s it. Bozer, get us there fast.” She calls Charlie and Cage to fill them in. Charlie promises to turn around and come help as soon as he gets Cage into position to watch over Douglas. He’s the bomb expert, and if it comes down to it, he’s the one they’ll need here. Riley can’t stop her whole body from shaking like she’s had too much coffee. The whole plan is coming together, and so far so good, but she knows that never lasts. 

Bozer pulls up outside the house, and Riley leads them to the tunnel entrance closest to it. They pry up the grating and Riley looks in, pulling out her small ankle gun as she does so.  _ Maybe I should carry a backup backup, like Jack. _

She carefully lowers herself into the tunnel, grimacing at the ache in her injured foot, and starts limping toward the location of the abandoned house. It’s where she would put the bomb. She just hopes her instincts are right. 

And then she hears the gunshot. 

“Mac!”

* * *

Mac blinks awake, shivering on a concrete floor. His wrists are tied behind him with rough rope, and his tac vest is gone, leaving him in only his thin, scorched button-down that doesn’t do a thing against the chill from the ground. 

For a second, terror leaves him petrified, certain that he’s back in Murdoc’s cellar and the past few months were some kind of fever dream. He’s imagined his team rescuing him before, this time he just managed to hold onto the illusion a little longer...dreams are always so much shorter than the same events in real life. 

But the face that turns toward him as he shifts and whimpers in pain isn’t Murdoc. The features are familiar, though, in their own way. They almost perfectly match the sketch made from the desription Eileen provided. There are a few more age lines, the nose is slightly crooked, and a beard obscures the pointed chin. But there’s no doubt that this is Dullahan. 

He’s fiddling with some sort of massive box in the center of the room.  _ That must be the bomb. _ Mac’s shaken mind races, trying to identify it from the smell of chemicals in the air.  _ Pena would have known… _ He shakes off the thought.  _ Pena’s gone. _ The image of the man’s scarred, twisted face rises up in Mac’s head and he flinches, gasping.  _ No, he’s not here.  _

“Well, well. I was wondering if you would ever wake up,” Dullahan says, a lilt of an Irish accent in his voice. He brushes off his hands and walks over to Mac, frowning. 

Mac groans. HIs head hurts so badly now. What was a pounding pain is now blinding, and the presence of any sound, even the quiet voice, is making it worse, like a blade of a knife stabbing directly into his brain. 

“What...what do you want with me?” He finally forces out between gritted teeth. “You’re going to regret this when my friends find you. They’ll kill you.” 

“Your friends will be too busy looking for you, to come after me,” Dullahan says, his face twisting into a sneer. “Unfortunately, even if they find you, there won’t be enough time to escape.”

He shoves Mac’s shoulder, pushing him back against the wall. Without his hands to catch himself, the back of his head hits the brick, and Mac cringes at the fresh explosion of pain. 

When he can think again, he manages what he hopes is a confident expression. “Jack is looking for me as we speak. And when he finds you, hell tear you apart.”

“Your friend who followed us?” Dullahan says with a shrug. “He’s knocked out and tied up in a burial chamber. Quite fitting, as he’s close enough to the blast range that he’ll spend eternity there with all the other bones.”

Mac snarls.  _ You can kill me, but don’t touch my family. _ Jack’s been rubbing off on him. “You’re going to be the one he buries, after I disarm this bomb.” 

“Oh, I don’t think so,” Dullahan says. “But, I might consider letting you both live. If you’ll agree to provide me with your expertise.”

“What are you talking about?” Mac asks.

“I study anyone who I think might be a help to my cause,” Dullahan replies. “That book you and your friends found, there’s a page for you. And a disc with your name on it. Skilled IED makers like you don’t come around too often.”

“Go to hell,” Mac bites out bitterly. 

“Oh, I think you’re about to experience it instead.” There’s a tiny beeping sound. “In...fifteen minutes. Clock’s ticking, Angus. Make a choice. You have five minutes before it’s too late.” Mac shudders at the use of his given name. It sounds too much like Murdoc. 

“I’d rather die than help you. And Jack would rather die than watch me turn.” Mac hopes he sounds stronger than he feels.  _ It’s true. If I did this to save Jack, it would kill him. It’s not what he wants.  _

“Oh, so he doesn’t know about your past? What you did all those years in Los Angeles?”

“I wasn’t going around killing people!” Mac shouts, feeling his already fragile control slipping.  _ I definitely missed my medication dose this time. And I can feel it. _ “You want to murder hundreds of people to get what you want, that’s not what I do.”

“Sometimes, death is all they will listen to,” Dullahan replies.

“Is that what you told Eileen?”

“Eileen?” Dullahan’s voice changes. “What do you know about her?”

“I know she hates you,” Mac bites out. “She helped us track you down, because she wants you to pay for what you did to her.” 

“I loved her like my own daughter,” the man says. “Her betrayal hurt me more than anything ever has.” He sounds genuinely hurt and remorseful, but Mac doesn’t buy it.  _ Even if he thinks he is, there’s no genuine emotion there.  _

“You don’t know what love means,” Mac snaps back, feeling like he’s talking to James instead of this man in front of him. “You told yourself you cared, but you never really did. You wanted her for what she could do for you, for her skills and her loyalty. That’s what you loved. Not the orphan girl you stole and twisted into a killer.”  _ I was lucky to get away from James when I did. He wanted me for the same reasons. To make me part of his deadly work. _

“You don’t know anything about what she was to me,” Dullahan says.

“Maybe he doesn’t, but I do.” Mac jumps at the sound of Eileen’s voice. He turns just enough to see her in one of the entrances to the room. She’s holding a gun in her still-cuffed hands, glaring at Dullahan with undisguised rage. 

“Eileen, stop!” Mac shouts, even as the action makes the world swim and flicker around him. “He’s already set the bomb. We have to make him disarm it!”

“He won’t.” Eileen says. 

“You don’t know that,” Mac gasps out.

“I know him.” Eileen’s voice simmers with fury. “I know what he’s done to me. He made me a killer. And now, I’m going to kill him.” 

“Eileen, you can’t do this. You’re like a daughter to me…”

“Because you killed my father!” There’s a sharp report of a gunshot, the acrid scent of powder smoke, and Dullahan falls backward, eyes wide in shock, blood pouring from his chest. Mac already knows it’s a kill shot. The Banshee doesn’t miss. 

Eileen looks down at him. “God, you look terrible.” She begins slicing the ropes around Mac’s hands.

“I have to stop the bomb,” Mac gasps. “He armed it, it’s going to go off in less than fifteen minutes.”

“You can’t stop it,” Eileen says. “The only thing we can do is run.”

“If I run away, a lot of innocent people are going to die. Maybe even my friends. Jack is down here somewhere, I can’t leave him to die.” Terror is escalating in his thoughts, sending all of them down a spiraling tunnel that ends in fire and pain. 

“Have it your way. Stay and die. I won’t.” Eileen stands up and vanishes into the mouth of a tunnel, leaving Mac alone with the bomb and Dullahan’s body. 

Mac’s head hurts so badly. He grimaces and presses the heels of his hands into his eyes, trying to get a grip. The room feels like it’s spinning and he can’t focus. He’s going to pass out...he can’t pass out. If he does, everyone is going to die. Riley and Bozer and Charlie and Cage and...and Jack.  _ I can’t let them die, I can’t let them die, I can’t.  _

He pulls himself to his feet and stumbles over to the device. It’s encased in something, a sheeting of heavy metal that forms a box around the outside. Mac can’t see a visible way to get inside. He drops to his knees, trying not to be sick from the pain, and makes his way over to Dullahan’s body, feeling for whatever remote the man must have used to arm it. When he finds it, he wants to curse in frustration. It’s a simple switch, there’s no way to reverse it to shut the bomb off. Once armed, it ticks down to its explosion. 

_ Why would he put it under metal sheeting? _ Mac frowns, it doesn’t make sense, like he’s trying to contain the explosion... _ Or force it in one direction.  _ One side of the housing must be weaker than the others, directing the blast toward the target. 

Footsteps echo on the stone floor, and Mac looks up, wondering if Eileen is back, had a change of heart. But it’s Riley and Bozer who come rushing in, Riley running awkwardly with her foot in a boot, both of them wide eyed with panic. 

“Mac!” Riley shouts, and he grimaces in pain as her voice seems to split his head open. “Are you okay?”

“NOt dead,” Mac grinds out. “But we all will be in eight minutes. He armed the bomb before Eileen shot him.”

“Eileen? Wait, what...never mind, we’ll figure it out later,” Bozer says. “Can you disarm it?”

“Charlie…” Mac whispers. He’s in too much pain, he can’t even think. He can’t risk trying to do anything to the bomb. 

“He’s still ten minutes out,” Riley says. “Not enough time. Mac, it’s up to you.” 

“No, the thing is too heavy. I can't lift it. The components are underneath. He put them there...It's too heavy, so I can't lift it.” Mac whimpers helplessly, he’s trapped and there’s nothing he can do and they’re all going to die and it’s his fault because he isn’t smart enough, isn’t strong enough, isn’t good enough to stop it. “No, I can't do it.”

“Hey, hey,” Riley says. 

“It's actually impossible. It's impossible!” Mac snaps, he doesn’t care that it hurts, he’ll be dead soon anyway. And so will all his friends because he couldn’t save them...

“Hey. Hey!” Riley rests a hand on his shoulder, sliding it to the back of his neck. The gentle warm pressure eases the pain just a little. “Mac, you’re the smartest person I know. You can do this. You need to focus. Okay?” 

“Riley, Bozer, you should run. Get out of here.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” She says gently, then chuckles. “I’m literally not going anywhere, Mac, look at my leg.”  _ She sounds like Jack. _

“Jack,” Mac whispers. 

“He’s not here,” Riley says softly. “But I’m sure he’s coming. He went after you…”

“I know. He’s somewhere in a tunnel, Dullahan found him,” Mac whispers. He flinches at the sound of Riley’s gasp. “Still alive, just tied up. In a burial chamber somewhere.”

“Bozer, go find him,” Riley orders. He nods and runs off. 

“Mac, it’s okay. Just breathe, and let your mind calm down.” Riley says. Mac looks past her to a tarp spread out near one of the entrances, and his mind starts turning over possibilites. 

“Actually, I have an idea.”

“Of course you do.” Riley smiles. “How can I help?”

“I need your belt. And his. Anything we can use for a rope, anything fairly sturdy,” Mac says, starting to fumble his own belt off. “It's just mechanical advantage and simple physics. You pull, I'll sneak under and disarm it.”

“Okay,” Riley says. “Are you sure I’ll be enough? Should I get Bozer back?”

Mac nods slightly. “We’ll probably need him.” Just then, Bozer reappears in a doorway, puffing and panting and dragging something heavy.

“Guys, I got Jack.”

“Good. Hope you didn’t wear yourself out pulling him, we got some more heavy lifting to do,” Riley says. “And not a lot of time to do it in.” 

Mac puts the finishing touches on his makeshift hoist. 

“You ready?” Riley asks. 

“Yup.”

“Nice,” Bozer says. Mac hands them the end of the rope.

“Okay, pull.” 

Both of them throw their weight into the rope, and the box, after a few horrible seconds, begins to sway into the air. Mac spares a single glance at Jack’s unconscious form before he starts to crawl under the bomb. 

“Try not to drop it on me,” He says with a weak chuckle.  _ Jack always lightens the moment with humor. And since he’s not awake to do it... _

“All right,” Riley says. “You got it, Mac.”

He glances up inside the bomb. There are a lot of wires, and he has to choose the right one, or everyone here dies. And he doesn’t have a lot of time to make that choice.

There’s an ominous ripping sound, and Riley gasps. The box tilts and falls a couple inches, and Mac flinches, cringing and almost dropping his knife. 

“Sorry!” Bozer pants. “Mac, we're running out of time.”

“We have 58 seconds, according to the countdown,” Mac whispers. 

“Yeah, according to the tarp, we have less,” Riley says. He can just see her feet, she’s digging in her heels on the concrete, and her plastic boot is starting to slide. 

_ Breathe, kiddo. You know what to do. Now just do it. _

He doesn’t aregue with the Jack voice in his head. He just positions the scissors over the green wire and cuts. 

He rolls out from under, just as the whole box falls with a rending crash. Riley and Bozer are staring at him in barely concealed panic. 

“I got it, I got it,” he pants out, shivering on the floor from pain and fading adrenaline.  _ I almost died, but I’m too tired to care. _

“All right,” Bozer says, and then glances over at the floor. “Oh, of course,  _ now _ Jack wakes up. Five seconds after we could have used his muscles.” 

Mac rolls over to try and see Jack, and it’s too much for his abused body. Sparks flicker around the edges of his vision, and pain lights up every nerve ending in his brain. Jack and Bozer’s blurry faces are the last thing he sees before the world fades out. 

* * *

PARIS HOSPITAL

Mac looks peaceful, aside from the scratches and bruises on his face, as he shifts and mumbles on his thin pillow. He’ll be fine, the doctors are saying, it’s just the head trauma that’s keeping him out of it for so long. Jack’s worried, but the doctors did say it could be a few more hours before Mac actually wakes up. 

Just then, there’s a soft groan, and blue eyes blink blearily up at him. 

“Welcome back to the land of the living, Sleeping Beauty.”

“Why am I in the hospital?” Mac asks, apparently the first second he can form coherent sentences. He glares at the ugly green gown as if it’s personally offended him. 

“You gotta stop gettin’ your bell rung, kiddo,” Jack says gently. 

Mac sighs. “They’re overreacting.”

“You were knocked out by a bomb, then a guy’s fist, and then you passed out and scared Riley and Bozer half to death,” Jack says. “The hospital is  _ not _ an overreaction.” He takes a deep, shaky breath.  _ I wanted to be there for him. God, I should have been there.  _ But Dullahan stole Mac right out from under their noses. 

“Why are you here? Are you okay?” Jack raises an eyebrow.  _ Why am I here? Cause you’re here, genius. But you just got conked, so I’ll let it slide.  _

“Ah, I’m fine, bud. Just a little crack on the noggin of my own, and some bruised ribs. Oh, and the nice case of road rash Bozer gave me, dragging me along the floor. All down my back and in some more...unmentionable places.” He shifts on his chair and grimaces. 

Mac rolls his eyes. “Did you have to say that?”

“It hurts, dude!” Jack says.  _ Not that I don’t deserve a good ass-whoopin’ for letting that kid get taken. _ He’s just lucky he got Mac back in mostly one piece.

Mac tugs on the thin blanket spread over him. “I’m cold, Jack.” 

“Okay, kiddo.” Jack knows Mac isn’t really as cold as he claims. But it’s a good excuse for asking Jack to come sit on the bed and hold him. Jack smiles and sits down on the edge of the mattress, pulling the blanket over his lap and swinging his legs up onto the bed. Mac scoots over a little to accommodate him, and then leans his head against Jack’s shoulder, closing his eyes.

“I thought you were going to die,” Mac whispers. “I couldn’t figure out how to stop the bomb, and I thought it was going to go off and you and Riley and Bozer and Cage and Charlie were all going to die, and so were hundreds more, because I wasn’t good enough at my job to save you.” He shivers. “I couldn’t think, Jack. It was too much. My head hurt and I couldn’t stop panicking...and maybe everyone was right. Maybe I shouldn’t be in the field if this is what happens when I get hurt.”

“I got news for you, kiddo, all of us have reasons we freeze up.” Jack shakes his head. “I know this is cause of that head trauma, but remember the normal rule was if you got hit in the head on an op you’re supposed to be sidelined? We just couldn’t find you to do it. Or you wouldn’t have had to be trying to defuse that thing. It coulda just as easily been Charlie down there if we’d been able to follow the plan. And kid, you did amazing. For as bad as you musta been hurting and how bad that explosion musta scrambled your brain, you  _ did it. _ You defused that bomb perfectly.” Jack shakes his head. “Listen, I know you feel like somehow you’re less valuable now because you have that issue, but honestly, taking people out of the field for concussions should be the standard operating procedure. I’m just too dumb to know when to call it quits. Probably because my concussions have had concussions.” He grins. “Nobody is at their best with head trauma, it’s not just you.” 

“Oh, is that what’s wrong with you?” Mac asks suddenly, punching Jack gently in the shoulder. 

“Probably is,” Jack replies, deadpan. “You better be careful about getting concussions, or you’re liable to end up as dumb as me.”

“You’re not dumb,” Mac says. “Just…”

“Don’t say it. Whatever you’re thinking, don’t say it.” Jack pulls the kid in a little closer, grinning and resisting the urge to rub a fist on top of his head to ruffle up his messy hair. “I don’t want to hear any more criticism from you until your brain is firing on all cylinders, kiddo.”

“Okay, Dad.” 

* * *

PARIS

THREE DAYS LATER

THEY’RE STILL NOT ALL CLEARED TO FLY BACK

Mac feels slightly better that he’s not the only one waiting around in the hospital. Riley had a stress fracture of the tibia, not a full break but enough to get her an immobilizing brace and a temporary bed rest order, which she’s majorly chafing at. Charlie has a nasty gash on his arm, and Jack has the injuries he described and a few more he apparently thought weren’t worth mentioning. 

But Mac doesn’t feel any better about still being in a bed when Matty shows up. He knows she isn’t judging, but he feels self-conscious about her seeing him in the hospital gown. Honestly, if it’s anyone other than Jack he feels uncomfortable. The material seems so flimsy, and the neck is too wide, always falling down and exposing one shoulder or the other. He tries to make sure it’s never the one with Murdoc’s brand cut into it. No one needs to see that. 

“Hey, boss lady, what’s going on?” Jack asks from his chair. “While you’re here, you gotta try the sandwiches in the lounge. They’re actually edible. I like european hospitals.”

Matty just shakes her head. “Eileen Brennan turned herself in to the French authorities. Seems she had a change of heart on her way out of Paris,” Matty says. 

“What’s going to happen to her?” Mac asks.

“Officially, she’ll be sent to a French-government operated blacksite for her crimes. Unofficially, there’s always a place in Phoenix for a black hat who wants to change.” Matty smiles just a little. “Her help was valuable in ending a major terrorist threat. And with the right training, the right people behind her, I think she could become an important asset.” Matty raises an eyebrow. “She figured out the location of the bomb even before our own team, which is frankly quite impressive, and I’d rather have a mind like that on our side than in the wind or locked behind bars. And Thornton agrees with me. Oversight has a recruitment order with Eileen’s name on it, ready to be signed and handed to French authorities.”

Mac takes a deep breath.

“I know this one hit home for you, Mac.” He nods.  _ A grieving child raised by a monster, of course it does. _ “Do you want to be the one to tell her? Otherwise I’ll send Cage.”

“I want to tell her,” He says. “I’ll do it.”

* * *

FRENCH HIGH SECURITY PRISON

THIS PLACE DOESN’T LEGALLY EXIST

Mac shivers at the sight of the bars and guards. He doesn’t like the reminders of his past, even now when it’s not a looming threat of becoming his future again. He takes a deep breath, reminding himself why he’s here. That he’s sparing someone else that trauma. At least, he will be if she doesn’t want to bite the hand that feeds her. There’s always that risk.

He signs in to see Eileen Brennan, and when he gives the name of the Phoenix, he’s waved through. Matty and Patty apparently haven’t been afraid to throw their weight around here, and he’s grateful for it. He didn’t want to spend too much time arguing with a frustrated guard about why he’s here to see a murderer. 

The body checks are unnerving, but at least they haven’t stripped him for them, he’s not the one accused of a crime. Finally, he’s determined to be clean, and buzzed through into the interview room.

A few minutes later, Eileen is led in from the prison side. Her hair is cropped short now, and the shapeless jumpsuit is a far cry from the sleek dress he saw her in that first night. Still, she looks happier than she did then, like there’s a weight off her. One that probably lifted the second her bullet found a home in Dullahan’s heart. 

Mac sits down in front of the glass, watching her do the same. “I know why you did what you did.”

“I couldn’t let him hurt anyone else. Not even if I go to prison for the rest of my life.” Eileen says. Her voice is strong and unconflicted. “What happened to him is on his own head. He taught me that killing was the solution.” 

Mac nods, slowly. “I understand how you feel.” There are days he imagines himself ending Murdoc’s reign of terror, and it scares him that he would be capable of that.  _ I’m different now too, than I was. He changed me. _

Mac knows that when it comes down to it, he won’t kill. But he hasn’t been groomed the way Eileen was. Hasn’t been raised as a killing machine. “I know what it’s like to be treated like a possession, like a tool. To be used.” His voice trembles and cracks, and he calms it before he continues. “But I also know that you can put it behind you. That your past doesn’t need to control your future if you choose not to let it. And you’re going to get the chance to start over.”

“After everything, Phoenix is offering some kind of deal?” Eileen sounds shocked. Mac knows how she feels.  _ You start seeing yourself as someone no one ought to go out of their way to help. You can’t understand why someone would do something out of the kindness of their heart, why people would want to give you a chance.  _

“You’ll still have to deal with the French government’s legalities for a little while. But if you want it, Oversight says Phoenix will take you. On a trial basis.” 

Eileen gives him a tiny smile. “I think I might like that.” 

* * *

THE PHOENIX FOUNDATION

RILEY GOT TIRED OF MEDICAL LEAVE

It’s not that Riley minds having more time at home, especially now that she has Abina. But her little sister (Riley’s taken to saying that, and it’s kind of stuck) is having a sleepover tonight with a few friends she met in one of her accelerated placement pre-college classes.  _ So I might have sort of scoped out all their digital footprints before agreeing to let Abina go. Worried mom much? _

She doesn’t really like the empty feeling of her apartment anymore, it’s funny how fast she got used to having a roommate again. Which is why, against medical advice, she drove herself to the Phoenix to catch up on some backlog work that she needs access to the building servers to work on. 

She’s typing away when Matty walks in. “Riley, we’re going to need a fully backstopped identity file for Eileen Brennan. As close to her legitimate one as possible.”

“She took the deal?”

“Yes. Signed the papers this morning,” Matty says. “She’ll be transferred from the French blacksite to Phoenix custody on a plane this evening. We’re sending her to the Cabin.” Riley nods. The Cabin is an off the grid Phoenix training site, made for one-on-one instructions, in the middle of the Montana wildnerness. A good place for a fresh start. 

“It won’t be too hard to put this together,” Riley says. “She dropped completely off the map when she left the orphanage, so creating a paper trail won’t mean having to work around any existing records.”

“I’ll leave that to you,” Matty says. 

Riley looks up again when Sam walks in. She’s wearing tac gear, her hair tied back in a ponytail and a duffel bag slung over one shoulder. “I just stopped in to say goodbye.”

“Goodbye?” Riley asks. 

“I’ll be taking personal responsibility for Brennan’s training from here out,” Sam says. “Thornton and Matty have agreed that I’m the best candidate for the job. If all goes well, in a year or so she’ll be evaluated and placed with an active Phoenix team. It’s all up to her now.”

“She’s been given quite the second chance,” Riley says. “I think she’s smart enough to take it.” She remembers what it was like hearing her own options.  _ I chose the CIA over prison time, and I worked hard to make sure that’s where I stayed.  _ And the same was true for Mac, and probably Cage as well. Better than half their team is made up of former criminals with checkered pasts. Eileen will fit right in. She’s sure there will be a struggle at first, but Riley can’t think of anyone better than Sam to deal with Eileen’s transition from lone wolf to team player. Except for maybe Jack. But Riley’s not ready to give Jack up to anyone else right now. Mac is enough. Maybe someday she’ll accept Eileen into the family circle too. Someday. 

“Good luck,” Riley says, and Sam smiles before walking away.  _ I’m going to miss having her around, but I think this is something she needs.  _ To bring her own past full circle, and help someone else change the way she was given the chance to.

“Do you have anything more on Dullahan?” Matty asks after Cage has disappeared.

Riley nods, opening the file she’s been putting together in her spare time. “His real name was Connor O’Rourke, born in Northern Ireland, joined the IRA thirty-two years ago, and made a name for himself as Dullahan. Irish spirit of death.” Matty nods. “Taking him down was a major win, but more importantly, we got access to his files. Charlie’s been sending me anything from the tapes that could help Phoenix.” She pulls up a series of videos and pages of notes. “Based on what we found in O’Rourke’s tapes and documents, he and Murdoc crossed paths over the years. Several times.”

“That explains the overlap between his and Eileen’s signature of warning their victims,” Matty says. “If he liked using successful assassin’s methods to train his people, Murdoc would have been the perfect template.”

“Unfortunately, we can’t question him about Murdoc, thanks to Eileen,” Riley says. “But I’m going to start crawling through all his files, see if we can turn up whatever rock Murdoc is hiding under.” 

“Do it. Don’t stop until you have something,” Matty says. Riley nods.

_ We’re going to get him. Sooner or later, we’re going to let Mac put his demons to rest. _


	9. Specimen 234+PAPR+Outbreak

###  309-Specimen 234+PAPR+Outbreak

SOMEWHERE IN SLOVENIA

THIS DAY IS NOT GOING WELL

“You know what this reminds me of?” Jack asks. “That movie with the pirates.”

“You mean  _ Pirates of the Carribean _ ?” Mac asks. 

“I said pirates. Close enough. Dude, do you always have to one-up me?” Jack shakes his head, turning back to the dog in front of them, sitting temptingly close to the bars of their cage, keys in his mouth. “Scooby, come here. Hi. You want to come here and give me that key? Come on.”

Mac has to admit, it does kind of look like the dog scene. But he’s too cold and hungry to be able to laugh about it right now. His head kind of hurts, but more than that there’s a creeping chill spreading through his bones that’s making him downright snappish. 

“I don't think he likes you.”

“Are you kiddin’? Dude, I have a way with animals. Like Mickey. He loves me.”

“Because you spoil him and play tug-of-war even though he’s not supposed to do that.” Mac shakes his head. 

“Ah, he ain’t going through testing again, that dog can do whatever the hell he wants. Don’t think I don’t see you lettin’ him sleep on your pillow. He ain’t s’posed to do that either.”

Mac shrugs. He has been spending a lot of time with Mickey. He feels safer with the dog around, and it’s also kind of comforting having the warm body there beside him, a warm body that isn’t human. It’s not that he doesn’t love it when he can just crawl into Jack’s bed after a nightmare, but sometimes he wakes up to a hand on his shoulder or arm and barely staves off a panic attack because it’s too much like memories of Murdoc. He knows Mickey’s not going to hurt him, the smell of dog is reassuring in its own way. 

“You know, I got kicked off the pirate ride at Disneyland,” Jack says. “Or wait. Was that the jungle one? I don’t remember. Riley knows.”

“You got kicked off a ride at Disneyland?” 

“Well, it was more like politely escorted by a guy in a safari costume. Who may or may not have told me I was no longer allowed on that ride.”

“What did you do?” Mac asks. This time, a soft chuckle does slip past his misery. But a shiver quickly follows it. Mac can feel the cold in his  _ bones. _ But he won’t tell Jack, because for one thing, there’s no way Jack can help. If anything, he’s probably colder, he only has a t-shirt, not a long sleeved shirt like Mac. And for another, he’ll start joking that this is exactly why Mac needs more meat on his bones.  _ I know I’m skinny, but I can’t help it.  _ It’s not like he’s not trying to gain weight. It just doesn’t really stay on, he keeps ending up hurt or sick or in medical for some other reason and loses all his progress. 

“An animatronic hippo mishap, that for the record was not my fault.” Jack rolls his eyes. “They overreacted. Wasn't that big of a deal. Hippos, that’s got to be the jungle ride, right?”

“I don’t know. Never been to Disneyland.” 

“You’ve never...Okay, why I even act surprised that your childhood sucked I don’t know. When we get outta here, I’m gonna make Riley get us tickets. I’m sure they’ve forgotten my face after five years. Right?”

Mac just shrugs, leaning gingerly on the cage bars. He’s cold and he wants to go home, where his dog is waiting to see him, not sit here in a cage in the mountains staring at a stubborn, uncooperative mutt. 

“And, you know, I always thought pirates were pretty cool,” Jack continues. “Like, Captain Hook was my favorite character. But in reality, they kind of suck.”

Mac nods. “They rigged this thing with enough explosives to blow us away even if I try to pick it or shake any of these loose.”

“I got this,” Jack says, reaching behind him into the dirt. “What dog worth his salt could resist a nice, juicy bone?”

“That’s been there a long time, Jack, it’s not  _ juicy. _ And do you know what kind of bone that is?” Mac asks. It’s been bugging him since he saw it. 

“Of course I do, I’m not stupid. Or at least not as stupid as I pretend to be,” Jack says, shaking his head. “But it ain’t doin’ whoever lost it any good. Hey, maybe this is actually just peg-leg dude’s leg. He was a real cliche, wasn’t he?”

Mac shakes his head again, and shivers. It’s starting to rain, and the wind is so chilly. 

“Hey, boy, you hungry? How about a nice, juicy human leg bone. Come on, boy.”

“Not sure if I’d hold my arm out that far,” Mac says. “Maybe that dog’s the one who took his leg off in the first place.”

“Highly unlikely. But maybe I should make you hold it out there anyway. You ain’t got…” 

_ Enough meat on my bones for him to want. _ Mac echoes the end of Jack’s sentence in his head.  _ I didn’t even have to say anything.  _

“I'm gonna think positive,” Jack says. “Come on, boy. How can you resist? Huh?” The dog cocks its head and takes a single step forward. “Look.” the dog drops the keys, darts in and grabs the bone from Jack’s hand, and trots off to gnaw on it in the underbrush, growling. “Yes! I told you I could talk to animals.”

Mac is finding it hard to share Jack’s enthusiasm. He frowns at the ring of keys lying in the grass. “We can't reach that.”

“Can you...can you whip up some go-go-gadget arms or something right now?” Jack replies.

Mac sighs, glancing around the cage. And then he sees the half-rotted shoe that was probably once attached to that leg Jack’s been waving around. “Actually, yeah. Yeah, I can.”

He pulls off his belt, shuddering at the feeling. It reminds him too much of the things Murdoc used a belt for.  _ He was almost as creative as I am with that. _ Except the things he did are the last things Mac would ever want to do. 

He shakes off the thoughts and focuses on turning the belt buckle and shoe sole into a sort of improvised fishing line for grabbing the keys. He sticks his arm out through the bars and tosses the belt as far as he can. 

It falls just slightly to the right of the key ring. Mac frowns, his aim is off. He’s not that dizzy, is he? He didn’t even think he actually had a concussion…

“Here, let me,” Jack suggests. “It’ll be like crackin’ a whip.” 

Mac nods and starts to pull the belt back in. Unfortunately, the rustling in the grass attracts the dog’s attention. It drops its bone and leaps to its feet, ears perking up.

Mac grimaces, handing the belt to Jack. “Do it fast, I think your buddy’s losing interest in gnawing on that leg.”

“Cool, we’ll just give him my arm,” Jack says. He reaches out of the cage and tosses the buckle. This time it lands inside the key ring. Mac holds his breath, watching as Jack begins to drag it back to them, painfully slowly. 

“I got it. Easy does it,” Jack whispers. The keys rustle through the long grass, and then one moves, making a soft clang. The dog leaps to its feet, racing toward the moving item. Jack stops pulling, but the damage is done. The dog grabs the keys triumphantly and begins shaking them like it’s caught an animal. 

“No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Bad doggy. Bad dog.” Jack says as the dog begins to trot off into the forest. “Come back. Don't you want your juicy bone?” Even his wheedling tone has no effect on the animal, which simply disappears into the trees, keys still jangling faintly. “I don't suppose you have a plan B, do you, Mac?”

Mac shakes his head just as the sky opens up, drenching them both in icy rain. He shivers harder, crouching on the muddy ground and trying vainly to keep at least a small amount of him dry. Wind whips across his skin, leaching away even more warmth and making his soaked shirtsleeves flutter wetly.  _ This sucks. _

“Hey, kiddo, we’re gonna get outta here,” Jack says, wrapping his arms around Mac’s shoulders and rubbing gently. “I know this looks bad, but we’re gonna be just fine. We always are.”

Mac nods. They’ll think of something. But right now, he just needs this. Jack’s warm arms and reassurance are chasing away the chill and panic, leaving his mind clearer and clearer. To think of a plan to get them out of here...

* * *

ABOUT TO LEAVE LOS ANGELES

RILEY FINALLY HAS SOMETHING COOL TO DO WITH INJURY LEAVE

Riley’s still got two weeks of rest and rehab before she can go back to work. The bone crack was very minor, it’s already set up, but the doctors don’t want her to risk damaging the new bone yet. So, she called Billy and told him she’s free for a while, if they want to do something that doesn’t involve a strenuous amount of time on their feet. Diane’s taking Abina for the weekend for some bonding time, and Riley has no idea what their plans are, but she’s sure Abina’s going to love it.  _ She’s getting to do the things she dreamed of, and I’m so glad we were able to give her that chance. _

Billy said he had the perfect plan for a weekend getaway, and a surprise waiting for her too. She really hopes it’s not a proposal, she’s definitely not ready for that yet. But she knows he knows she wants to take things slow. And she’s just going to have to trust him, because isn’t that how relationships work? She thinks so. It’s not like she’s ever had a normal one.

But she  _ is _ starting to wonder what the surprise can possibly be, because if showing up in a sports car at her front door isn’t it, she wonders what exactly Billy considers worthy of terming a ‘surprise’. 

“Um, what is this?” She asks as soon as he steps out. 

“A brand-new Bentley.” Billy slaps the top of the car proudly, leaving a faint handprint on the charcoal metal-flake paint. 

“I see that. But when you said you were renting a Winnebago for the road trip, I thought you were...uh...renting a Winnebago.” She was actually sort of looking forward to it. All her road trips have either been taken in one of Jack’s cars, a Phoenix tactical van, the back of an army transport, or the much less enjoyable trunk of a car.

“Anything wrong with wanting to take my girl on a road trip in style?” Billy asks.

Riley shakes her head, smiling. “Babe, you know I don't care about these things.” Still, the idea of a cross country trip in a car like this is starting to grow on her. Even if she feels highly underdressed for it. Jeans and a crop top aren’t exactly Bentley level fashion sense.

Billy hurries up the steps to hug her. “And that's why you're my girl. But L.A. to Dallas is a long trip, and I want to do this thing right.”

You do everything right.” Riley smiles, looking up at him. “Is this the surprise?”

“No, it’s still comin’.” 

“It’s not a diamond ring, is it?” Riley asks, only half joking. 

Billy shakes his head. “No, babe, not yet. I like how things are going right now.”

“Yeah, me, too.”

Billy reaches for her suitcase. “Here, let me take that.”

“All right.” Riley knows he knows she’s an independent woman. But she also really appreciates being shown this kind of courtesy. It reminds her of Jack, in a way. 

“And that,” He reaches for her purse, then her hand to help her into the car.

“Thank you.” Riley sits down, admiring the soft seats, the sleek dashboard, and the new car smell that hasn’t even worn off yet. “This thing is nice. So how much this set you back?”

Billy grins, climbing in the driver’s seat. “Not a penny. Some skip put it up for collateral. He jumped bail. His loss, our gain.”

“Does Mama know we're driving this?” Riley asks hesitantly. 

“Sure she does. She was all for me taking you in this. You know she loves you, Riley. We could even take turns at the wheel.”

“That's definitely happening. Oh, and I got the music,” Riley says, holding up her phone open to her “Jack Dalton Road Trip” Willie Nelson and Classic Rock playlist, just to see the look on his face. 

Oh, no,” Billy says, shaking his head with raised eyebrows. “I fell into that trap before. We're taking turns deejaying.”

“All right. Deal.”

Billy turns the engine over and revvs it, and Riley feels the rumble through the seat. Hopes of a hippie-style camping vacation aside, this is awesome. The last time she was in a car this cool, she was racing through the L.A. streets from some guys who really wanted to kill her. Now she gets to enjoy the feel of the car without wondering if she’ll live to tell the tale. 

“All right, this is definitely cooler than a Winnebago.”

* * *

MAC AND JACK’S HOUSE

THE FRIDGE LOOKS LIKE IT BELONGS TO A RESTAURANT

“Jack, what is all this?” Mac asks. “I opened this up looking for the juice and there’s half the grocery store in here.” He holds up a large bag of carrots and sets it on the counter before pulling several other things out to get to the gallon of orange juice and pour some into a glass. He swallows a mouthful with a slight grimace. Jack frowns.  _ That was dated for a week from Wednesday. Can orange juice even turn? _

“Seriously, dude, you need to eat more. And to eat more, we have to cook more. Man cannot live on granola bars and instant oatmeal packets alone. Or, God forbid, MREs.” Jack’s getting very, very tired of mid-mission food sources. And he really hopes they have a few days off so he can start using up some of the stuff in that fridge.  _ I will admit, I got a tiny bit carried away. And forgot we’re spies who get sent overseas on a regular basis.  _

“I don’t need five pounds of hamburger,” Mac says, holding up a package as he sets it back into the fridge, fending off an enthusiastic Mickey.

“Oh, that’s for when I invited Leanna and Bozer over for next Tuesday.” Jack plunges another pan into the soapy water. He and Mac have sort of let the dishes pile up, a side effect from a lot of long days and coming home to eat a quick meal and fall into bed exhausted. “We’re gonna grill out. As long as you haven’t...you know, turned it into a flamethrower again.” He doesn’t really want a repeat of nearly singing his eyebrows off. 

Mac grins. “You really like being here, don’t you?”

“Hell yeah. My last place had a rule about no grills. Not even on the fire escape. For a steak loving Texan, that is unacceptable.”

“You know what I mean,” Mac says, shaking his head and sitting down on one of the bar stools with his glass of juice.

Jack does. He feels like this place is more his home than his apartment ever did, and he’d been there for years. “It’s...it’s a house, you know?” Jack says. “I mean, ever since I left the ranch, I’ve been living in apartments. This...feels like a home. Like the kinda place I always figured I’d raise my kids in.” He looks over at Mac with a gentle smile. “I guess I got my wish, huh? Just in a way I never expected.”

Mac nods. “Two kids and you’re not even married. Kinda putting the cart before the horse. Especially since they’re not even biologically yours.”

“Yeah, I mean, I wouldn’t be close to the first unmarried dad, but this whole adopted family thing...well, it’s a crazy life I wouldn’t trade for anything.”

“Are we still having Diane over on Friday?”

“Plannin’ on it.”

“When are you gonna give her that ring you got sitting on the dresser?”

“Huh?” Jack asks. “Wait, you saw that?”

“I was putting away your shirts, it was kind of hard to miss,” Mac says. “It’s pretty.”

“I mean, it’s more a just in case than anything. I don’t know if she’s ready for that. Yet.” Jack slides a dish into the cupboard. “And...I don’t know if  _ I’m _ ready for it.”

Mac nods. “I get that. But...just so you know, you have my blessing to do it. Whenever you stop getting cold feet.”

“Okay, now which one of us sounds like the parent?” Jack asks. “But seriously. Dude, that means a lot. I’m glad you like her.”

“As far as stepmothers go, she seems like a good one,” Mac says. “Not likely to poison me or turn me into a tree or a deer or something.”

“I’m gonna tell her you said that.” The horrified look on Mac’s face is so good Jack wishes his hands were dry so he could grab his phone. 

Which begins buzzing a few seconds later. Jack sighs, wiping his soapy hands on his t-shirt and grabbing the phone. He turns to Mac with a sigh. 

“It's Matty. She wants us mobile. We'll be briefed mid-flight.”

“Yeah, I just got the text too, and Bozer says he and Leanna got called out for it too. 

“Alright. Well, sorry, kiddo, looks like a home-cooked breakfast is off the agenda for the day.” Jack sighs, setting the cast-iron skillet back down on the stove. “You okay with a rain check?   
“Yeah, let’s go save the world,” Mac says with a grin. 

* * *

SOMEWHERE OVER THE UNITED STATES

THIS IS STARTING TO FEEL LIKE THE PREQUEL TO AN OUTBREAK MOVIE

Matty’s face looks uncharacteristically concerned. Boze doesn’t like that at all. “The CDC is asking for help…”

“The Center of Disease Control needs  _ us _ ? Well, that can't be good.” Jack frowns.

_ And I wholeheartedly agree with Jack’s concerns.  _ Bozer will admit that he really enjoys a good disease-based horror movie. Hell, one time he and Mac shot a short film about a virus that turned its victims into weird creatures with skin like tree bark and giant fangs. Bozer’s still proud of the makeup work on that one.

That doesn’t mean he wants to see it happen in real life. He lived through the 2009 swine flu, when kids all through the city were getting sick, when people he knew, young people who should have been strong enough to fight it, died.  _ Every time one of us kids sneezed, Mama about had a heart attack. _

“They're keeping the details under wraps. All they'll say is they have an inventory discrepancy.”

Jack shakes his head. “An inventory discrepancy. Translation, they lost something. Oh, man, this has zombie apocalypse written all over it.”

Matty audibly groans. “Jack, you are about to meet with some of our country's most highly intelligent, highly trained scientists. Please, try not to say anything stupid.”

“Normally, I'd agree with you, Matty, but I think if anyone's gonna want to talk about the zombie apocalypse, it's gonna be the CDC.” He turns to Leanna, hoping to get a chuckle or at least a grin, but she’s focused completely on the briefing screen.  _ Weird. _ Usually he can always count on Leanna to laugh at his humor. 

“Go assist and report back. If they're asking for help, something serious is going on,” Matty says. 

“Yes, ma'am.” Jack switches off the screen, then turns to the others. “Okay, how bout a nice in-flight game of “Pandemic” to pass the time? Get us prepared mentally and all that.”

“That is the exact opposite of a good idea, Jack,” Mac says. “But I’m game.” 

* * *

ON THE ROAD TO DALLAS

RILEY’S FIRST REAL ROAD TRIP WITHOUT JACK

“Streetlights, people...Livin’ just to find emo-otion, hiding…somewhere in the n-i-i-ight…” 

“Oh, my gosh. Stop, Riley, my ears can’t take it.” Billy chuckles.

_ He’s lucky I’m not Jack. I may butcher  _ Don’t Stop Believing _ when I sing it at the top of my lungs, but that is nothing compared the the Jack Dalton carefully honed skill of how to piss off interrogators.  _ Riley’s not sure it actually accomplishes anything other than making them hit him harder because he’s more annoying, but that’s probably his goal anyway. He always tries to take attention off her. 

“What? This song's a classic.” Riley feigns innocence. Just another thing she learned from Jack. How to react when your singing skills are criticized is one of the first things he taught her. By example. Repeatedly.  _ I think I eventually just went tone deaf in self-defense.  _

“Um, the original is a classic. What you just did do it, I-I don't know about that.”

“Imagine what Journey would say if they found out you stopped believin'.”

“Put me on the midnight train goin’ anywhere, I guess.” Billy chuckles. 

“Love me, love my music,” Riley says. “Or, well, Jack’s music.”

“He really is your dad now, isn’t he?” Billy says. “Even Elwood said that when…”

Riley stops humming and turns to look at Billy. “Whoa, whoa. Time out. You-you and Elwood met?”

Billy nods. “He called me. He wanted to know the guy that's dating his daughter. And I know you guys have issues, but he loves you. And he's super protective.”

Riley nods. She’ll never forget how horrified Elwood looked when he found out she was mixed up with anything involving James MacGyver.  _ I didn’t realize he cared, not when I spent my childhood getting hauled around to meet his various criminal buddies and thinking of them as my uncles. _ Then again, all Elwood’s friends were small timers. Not mass murdering weapons dealers like James. 

“Yeah.” She frowns. “Guess he realized what he lost when he left, and now he’s trying to make up for it.” He’ll never be able to completely atone for the lifetime of abuse and scars he left her with, but they can move forward and forgive. At least he’s trying. If there’s one thing working in covert ops has taught Riley, it’s that people can do terrible things, and that isn’t all of who they are. Jack has never, ever raised a hand to her, but she’s seen what he’s done to people who threaten her safety, or Mac’s. More than that, she knows about his wetwork past. And Sam Cage, her former roommate, was the kind of person Riley would have been sent to take out. Permanently. And Eileen, just recently...

“Yeah. Family is everything to him now. Better late than never, right?” 

“So what else did he say?” 

“A lot. I mean, there was the usual shotgun shovel talk, which was hard to take seriously when I’ve caught bail jumpers scarier than him.” Billy laughs. “I just told him that he doesn’t need to worry, cause I’m pretty sure if I ever do anything to hurt you, you’ll break every bone in my body and then delete me from existence. And that doesn’t even take into account Jack filling me full of lead and Mac...probably doing something creative and painful with tinfoil and vinegar.”

“Wow, that’s...very specific. And not wrong.”

“It was a long lunch. We got into your relationship, his regrets.” Billy glances at her again. “You know, he’s really glad that you're giving him a chance. And so am I.”

“Yeah, me, too.” Riley pulls out her phone and unlocks it. 

“What are you doing?” Billy asks. “You’re not putting on another one of your karaoke jams, are you?”

“Don't worry, I'm not planning to torture your ears again right now. I'm just checking in with Matty.”

“She's not gonna answer.”

Riley raises an eyebrow. “And how do you know that?”

“I know. I had my mama call her before I came out to L.A. She told her I was hoping to spend some quality time off the grid with you. So unless the world's ending and she needs some extra hands, you're all mine.” He grins, reaching over to squeeze her hand. “So put that thing away, and let me have a turn at the music, huh? Like, I thought the rule was driver runs the radio.”

Riley laughs. “This cannot get any better.”

“Oh, but it will.” Billy points to a sign on the side of the road.

“And how is that?”

“Well, looks like the ‘best barbecue’ is only three miles ahead. I'm from Louisiana. I'm not gonna let a statement like that go unchallenged.”

* * *

CDC LABS

NOT A PLACE THINGS SHOULD BE GETTING LOST

Mac hopes he looks more confident than he feels when the doctor they’re here to meet welcomes them into her office. “Hello, I’m Dr. Falama. Thank you for coming.” The woman shakes their hands quickly and efficiently. “I'd appreciate you keeping the reason for this visit under wraps.” 

“Of course,” Mac says. 

“Um, happy to help, although all we've been told so far is you have an inventory discrepancy,” Jack says. 

The woman nods. “Yesterday, we discovered a cryotube was missing from the cold storage unit in our level-four biosafety lab.”

“Just to be clear, level four is where the big boys live,” Bozer says. “Right?”

“If by "big boys" you mean diseases with no cure, then yes. The missing agent is a strain of a particularly deadly virus.”

Jack raises an eyebrow. “Mm-hmm. What kind of virus are we talking about here, Doc? Solanum? T-Virus? What do we got?”

“Those aren't even real,” Bozer says. 

“Not yet, they're not.” Jack frowns. “And I’ve seen some freaky stuff. Trust me, those things are tame compared to what the CIA’s got on ice.” Mac shudders. He fully remembers that his first op with this team, the reason they pulled him out of a supermax in the first place, was to retrieve a canister of deadly virus.

“We call it Specimen 234,” Dr. Falama says. “It spreads fast, by contact with skin. So far we haven’t seen it become a major airborne problem, it appears to settle on surfaces or be passed from victim to victim by touch or contact with bodily fluids like saliva and mucus. It has symptoms that present like the flu, so it’s virtually undetectable except by virology testing. And worst of all, it has a ninety-nine percent mortality rate. If it got into the population, we'd be looking at a pandemic. Millions would die.”

“Has anything like this happened before?” Leanna asks. Her voice sounds sort of stiff. Mac frowns. Usually Jack is the one being weird about stuff like this. Although Mac has the feeling it’s mostly that Jack is worried for his team, not himself.

“We've had discrepancies in the past, but nothing this deadly has been missing this long. Misplaced samples are usually found within hours in another storage unit or lab, but we're having a hard time tracking this one down.”

“So, it's in the building, it's just playing hide and seek?” Bozer says.

“We hope.” Dr. Falama’s face is tight with worry. “Unfortunately, I’m not sure exactly how that happened. To the best of our knowledge, we believe Specimen 234 went missing during an incident in the lab yesterday.”

“An incident. You do know that's how horror movies start, right?” Bozer asks, and Jack is nodding in agreement.

“What happened, someone turned into a giant green rage monster?” Jack asks. 

Dr. Falama actually cracks a weak smile.  _ Apparently Jack’s tension defusing technique works on more than just me. _ “Nothing so dramatic. It's just that one of the containment units holding some experimental subjects wasn't latched correctly.”

“Experimental subjects?” Mac asks. This sounds as ominous as dialogue ripped from Bozer’s outbreak film they made in high school. When Mac played the test subject in a cage. It was kind of fun then. The memory hasn’t aged well, not after prison. Being in a cage isn’t something out of a hypothetical horror movie anymore. It’s an all too real experience. And he spent every day wondering when one of the men who came for him was going to infect him with something that couldn’t be cured. He’s still shocked that that didn’t happen. It easily could have. Too easily. But the only permanent thing he was left with was a lot of trauma.

“Experimental subjects were just our rats,” Falama clarifies. “Not ones that were currently exposed to 234, however.”

“Well, we've passed over a dozen security cameras since we passed through the lobby, I'm assuming you have some footage you can show us?” Leanna says. 

“Yes. Here, take a look.” The doctor turns her desk computer, and presses play. Mac watches as a group of suited scientists shuffles around the lab, attempting to corral the rats, a few of which have managed to get off their table and into corners or under equipment. It would be almost funny if the situation weren’t so high-stakes. The scientists, encumbered by their pressurized suits, are fumbling with the rats, trying to keep a grip on them with thickly gloved hands. 

“So, the infected rats of Nimh escaped their cage,” Jack mutters.

“Yes. But we took every necessary precaution to contain the subjects and decontaminate the lab.” Falama pauses the video. “It wasn't until four hours later we discovered 234's absence.”

“So you think that the virus was misplaced during the chaos and confusion of the clean-up?” Mac asks. 

“Yes. And I need 234 found quickly and quietly. If word got out a level-four bioagent was missing, it would cause mass panic.”

Leanna nods. “I'd like to go through the security footage. Look for anything your team may have missed. Bozer, want to help me comb through four hours of tapes?”

“Well, it’ll be the most boring “Patient Zero” movie ever, but yeah, sure. Always game for movie night with you, babe.” Bozer chuckles. “As long as when we go home tonight, we marathon my list of all time best pandemic horror movies.”

“Deal.” 

“Yeah, and Jack and I would like to inspect the lab,” Mac says. Hoping he sounds more confident than he feels. Jack gives him a tiny nod before launching into his typical tirade about zombies. 

“We would? Uh, yes, we want to go to the place where all the super viruses hang out. Yeah. Sounds fun.”

* * *

THERE’S DEFINITELY A ZOMBIE VIRUS SOMEWHERE IN THIS BUILDING

“I'm going to assume that the level-four lab would require a security card to access, yes?” Jack asks as they walk. 

Dr. Falama raises an eyebrow. “Every lab requires a security card. You can't get anywhere in the building without clearance. You two are signing in as my guests, which will get you past the doors, but we do keep a log of anyone who is signed in by our employees, and nothing out of the ordinary was noted. All sign-ins were followed up with, they all check out.” 

“And they matched with security footage?” Jack asks.

“We checked once, and I’m sure that’s what your people are doing now.” Jack nods. He trusts Leanna and Boze to go over the security tapes with a fine-tooth comb. If there’s a problem, they’ll find it. 

“Getting you in is going to be a bit of a process,” Falama says, opening a door that leads to what looks like a locker room. “Street clothes are swapped for scrubs to avoid carrying any contaminants into the lab. Anyone looking to access level four must put on a positive pressure suit. Every scientist has their own. Before exiting the suit room, each suit is thoroughly examined for rips or tears.”

“What happens if you find a hole?” Jack asks.

“If it's small, the scientist will log it and cover it with duct tape. Anything larger than half an inch, and the scientist either has to submit the suit for permanent repair or request a new one.”

“Duct tape. Hey Mac, I think you have all the necessary qualifications to work here,” Jack chuckles. “He carries a roll of it around with him.”

Dr. Falama gives Mac an interested glance, clearly she’s not too sure exactly what his role is.  _ That’s fine, I never know what to call him either. Troubleshooter is basically the only really accurate description.  _ “The locker rooms don’t require the high level access keycard, and there’s no security cameras inside, for obvious reasons. But there’s no way someone could have gotten from them to the lab without a key. They don’t lead directly to the labs, just to a waiting room.” She glances at Mac and Jack. “I’m going to go change in the womens’ and meet you in there.”

Jack follows Mac inside, grabbing two pairs of clean scrubs from the shelves by the door, making sure the ones he finds for Mac will be small enough that the kid won’t be absolutely swimming in them. He hands Mac his, then starts changing into his own. He frowns when he doesn’t hear the telltale rustle of cloth coming from Mac’s part of the room. 

“You okay, kid?”

Mac nods, he’s only gotten as far as getting his plaid button-down and t-shirt off and his belt undone. “Just not a fan of locker rooms. Especially cold ones.” He’s shivering violently, arms wrapped around his skinny body. Jack looks quickly away from the thick scar on his chest. 

_ It’s not that cold in here. _ But Jack knows the kid’s probably got more things on his mind than the temperature. Stripping and changing into the plain scrubs probably feels all too much like prison. 

Jack doesn’t dare touch the kid while he’s half undressed, even though all he wants to do is put a hand on Mac’s shoulder and reassure him that it’s going to be fine. “Well, the quicker we get changed, the quicker we get outta here.”

Mac nods, and Jack turns his back to give the kid privacy while he finishes changing. Mac’s still shifting uncomfortably in the slightly loose scrubs when Jack turns around, and even though they’re a bright teal blue instead of convict orange, the general shapelessness and cut of them does look too much like the prison uniform Mac was wearing when Jack first met him. 

The bright blue of the scrubs makes Mac look both paler and pinker-cheeked at once, almost feverish. Jack frowns.  _ You’re seeing things. You haven’t even gone into the lab yet. He’s not infected with anything.  _

Once they’re dressed, they follow Dr. Falama to the pressure suit room, where she pulls out three of the thick white suits and lays them out. Jack carefully steps into his. He’s worn these before, and it’s never exactly a comfortable experience. But it’s definitely better than dying.

Their air hoses are attached, and the three of them step into the lab where the rats escaped. It looks pristine, clearly cleaned and scrubbed after the test subjects’ escape

And here we go.

“Has this place been cleaned?” Mac asks. 

“Nothing's been moved since we discovered Specimen 234 was missing. However, we didn’t discover that until we’d already cleaned the lab after the rats escaped,” Falama says. “So we’ve tried to check small spaces where the vial could have fallen, or any drawers it might mistakenly have been shoved into during cleanup. It’s very unlikely that our people would have put a cryotube anywhere it didn’t belong, but there is a slim chance that it was picked up with some instruments or other items.” She doesn’t sound very confident, though. “This is where it should have been,” She says, opening a cold storage room. “We’ve double and triple checked the storage units there to make sure the tube wasn’t incorrectly replaced, although you’re welcome to check again just in case.”

“So, every scientist who has access to this lab can also get into the cold storage unit where 234 was being kept?” Mac asks. 

“Yes, but we already interviewed the four scientists who were in the lab when the rats escaped. None of them were working on that flu strain.”

Mac frowns. Jack knows that look in his eyes, even through the hood shielding of his suit.  _ He’s got an idea, and we’re not going to like it.  _ “When's the last time somebody did work with it?” 

“Four days ago. But the cryotube was returned to cold storage that same day.”

“Could you, uh, read me the details on the incident report?” Mac asks.

“Sure.” Dr. Falama takes a tablet from one of the tables, and apparently logs into her personal database. A few minutes later, she looks up. “Six test subjects were found loose on the examination table at 2:37 p.m. yesterday. Clear liquid was found pooled on the table near the cage door. Testing revealed it to be 100% glycerol. It's a common product used in the lab. The spill was determined to be unrelated.”

Mac frowns again, the lines in his forehead furrowing deeper.

“What are you thinking, Mac?” Jack asks.

“I'm not sure yet.” Mac glances at Dr. Falama. “What are the lab's exit procedures?”

“I’ll walk you through them when we leave the lab.” Falama replies. “Is there anything more you want to see in here?”

“I want to take a look at the cage latch,” Mac says. “I see the test subjects have been removed from the room.” 

“For decontamination, yes. I’m afraid that as the subjects were exposed to the external lab area and potential infections other than they were intended to be given, they were considered ineffective and destroyed.” 

“I don’t need to see the rats, just the cage.” Mac says.

“There’s another one in the corner here.” Falama lifts it onto a table. 

“And they’re all identical? All of them latch with this carabiner type lock?”

“Yes, but there’s no way the rats could have undone it themselves, the door material around the lock is solid plexiglas.”

“Did you find the latch?”

“Actually...no. I believe the report states that it was replaced, and that since cleanup was interrupted, it’s assumed to be somewhere around here.”

“Okay, that’s all I needed. I think we can leave.” Mac looks up. “Jack, you okay with that?”

“Dude, the sooner we get out of this place, the better I will feel. Hey, I’m not developing purple blotches, am I? Or, like, lizard scales?”

“No, Jack.” The chuckle he gets from Mac is worth the glare from Dr. Falama. 

He’s not so sure the hosedown procedure is worth it. “How long do we have to do this?” He has to shout to be heard over the spray.

“Everyone exiting level four is required to take a seven-minute chemical shower.”

Mac is looking up into the corner of the room. “You know, if a scientist was carrying something out of here that he shouldn't be, that camera would definitely catch it.”

Falama shakes her head, which is sort of hard to notice under her hood. “I checked the footage. No one exited the lab holding a cryotube.”

They step out into the suit room, and Mac, as soon as his suit is off, begins examining all of them, running his fingers over the protective coating. 

“What are you looking for now?” Falama asks. 

“This.” Mac holds up the sleeve of a suit. “Duct tape residue.”

“Well, as I explained before, our scientists use duct tape to patch small tears in their suits.” Falama clearly doesn’t see where Mac is going with this. But Jack is starting to get the picture. 

“It’s residue, not a patch. If that tape came off, whoever was in that suit would be in danger of contamination again, right? And besides, I don't see a tear anywhere near that residue. So why would someone put duct tape on it?”

“Whose suit is this?” Mac asks. 

“It's a guest suit. It's not assigned to a doctor.”

“Interesting,” Mac hangs the suit back up with the others. “What are the rest of the exit procedures from here?” 

“Anyone exiting the lab will take another shower, put on their street clothes, and then be free to leave the facility.”

Mac takes a deep breath, looking at both the doctor and Jack with concerned eyes. “Dr. Falama, I have bad news. Your virus was not mistakenly misplaced. This was a well-orchestrated heist.”

“Someone Ocean Eleven'ed the virus?” Jack asks.

Falama shakes her head. “Getting a level-four bioagent out of the building would be impossible.”

“Nothing is impossible,” Jack says. “Mac knows how he would have done it. Tell her, Mac.” Jack grins, watching the kid walk people through what his brain can create in seconds is always cool. 

Mac nods. “Someone with BSL-4 access entered the cold storage and used their body to block the surveillance camera across the room. They then removed a cryotube of the virus and hid it beneath a piece of duct tape on their suit. The spilled glycerol was, in fact, the most clever step in this heist. Your thief replaced the lock on the rat cage with a frozen rod of glycerol, then hid the lock so it wouldn’t be noticed lying around on a table.”

“Why would they do that?” 

“Because the glycerol would take about 30 minutes to melt, giving this person more than enough time to make it through all of the lab's exit procedures. Your thief used the rats as a time-delay distraction. They would've been clear of the lab before any rodent-related emergency procedures began, giving them plenty of time before anyone noticed the missing virus.”

“I think it's time we looked at your security footage again,” Jack says. 

They still have to take another shower before leaving the lab areas. Jack is perfectly okay with as many cleanup procedures as needed, but Mac is clearly struggling. Even though it’s just him and Jack heading to the showers, he’s huddled in on himself, and he seems hesitant to remove his scrubs until Jack turns around. 

Jack knows Mac was treated brutally while Murdoc had him, and that all Mac’s previous trauma has probably come flooding back. Still, it’s heartbreaking to see Mac cringing and huddling away from someone he knows would never hurt him. 

_ He never should have been hurt. Never should have had to be this afraid. _ Jack sighs. He wishes they’d gotten to Mac a whole lot sooner. Like the CIA got to Riley.  _ She could have ended up in the same situation. _ Although Jack doubts she’d have faced the same continuous threat of assault from fellow prisoners, he knows guards could have taken advantage of their position, or that Riley might have agreed to something in order to make her life easier and get some protection. And there would still have been all too many threats of violence. He’s glad someone got to her when they did, glad she was spared the trauma of prison and the stigma of a sentence following her for the rest of her life. He just wishes they could have saved Mac too. 

Jack turns on the water and steps under it, scrubbing hard at his skin with the disinfecting cleaner he was given. He wants to get the creepy feeling of being in that lab space off his skin. 

Mac is shivering violently. Jack takes a deep breath. He’s not sure whether he should say something or pretend everything is fine. The kid’s fine with the showers at Phoenix, but that’s because they’re familiar. This place is clearly giving him flashbacks. Jack can see how small Mac is trying to make himself, and decides against saying or doing anything. He doesn’t want to startle the kid. Mac would be absolutely mortified if he slipped on the wet floor and had to have Jack or a medic help him, and the kid’s just klutzy enough to do just that. 

Jack looks away from the skinny, scarred, shaking shoulders and focuses on making sure he’s not carrying any zombie plague out into the world. He shuts off the water after he hears Mac’s shower stop, and steps out, reaching for a towel.

He can hear Mac’s teeth chattering as the kid scrubs himself dry and starts pulling on his street clothes. Jack hands over his jacket without a word. Mac takes it and drapes it around his shoulders over his plaid flannel.  _ It’s small enough comfort, but it might be reassuring, and better than me touching him.  _

When they walk back into Dr. Falama’s office, Bozer and Leanna are waiting for them. 

“So far we haven’t found anything unusual on the video,” Leanna says. “But there’s a lot to wade through.”

“We might be able to narrow that down,” Jack says. “Uh, Boze, take us to ten minutes before the lab was shut down.”

“Before?” Bozer asks. “Uh...I thought whoever took this thing would have done it in the confusion of getting the rats picked up.”

Okay, say you're right and my bio-agent was stolen. A virus needs to be kept frozen to remain viable. Anyone working here would know that. So even if they got it out of the lab, how would they transport it? 

“Hey, Bozer, zoom in right there,” Mac says, pointing to one corner of the screen. “That's how. Fill one of those vacuum containers with liquid nitrogen, you have yourself an improvised traveling cold storage unit.”

“And here we have our culprit,” Leanna says. “This is the person who exited the lab during the time frame Mac gave us.” She pulls up a CDC ID. 

“That's Dr. Luca. But he would never do something like this,” Falama says.  _ Lady, you sure are insisting that what clearly happened here couldn’t have. _ It’s getting frustrating.  _ You’re a scientist, and we laid out all the evidence for you. But because it doesn’t fit your preconceived view of how things work, you won’t accept it. _ She’s so convinced nothing can be stolen from the lab that she’s held back on asking for help until now. When it might be too late.

“Except he just did,” Is all Jack lets himself say out loud.

Leanna nods. “I’ll start looking for him in any cameras. Friar will find him if he’s out there.” 

Falama shakes her head. “It makes no sense. He’s the most conscientious of all of us. So careful to avoid any chance of contamination. He’s the most dedicated man I’ve ever seen trying to keep any of these from infecting the population, and looking for cures.”

“Unfortunately, every man has his price,” Jack says. “Leanna, you want to dig into his financials, see who paid the good doctor to make off with this thing? We might have better luck tracking him through that than trying to follow him.”

Jack paces while Leanna types. 

“I don’t see any payments made to any of his accounts. However, Luca did make some pretty hefty withdrawals from his savings account in the days leading up to the theft.

“Sounds like a guy prepping to drop off the grid and do God knows what,” Jack says. He’s seen it before. This kind of thing doesn’t usually end well. 

“Maybe he plans to go freelance, build this thing into a weapon and sell it?” Bozer asks. “How do we find him?”

“Luca's vacuum container trick it would only work for three hours, tops, so if he wanted the virus to remain viable, he'd have to store it properly,” Mac says. “I think we should run a search for any biocontainment cold storage units that have sold recently.”

“Well, there can't be that many people in the market for one of those,” Jack says. “I mean, not like it's the next Game of Thrones book.”

“Jack Dalton read Game of Thrones?” Bozer asks, chuckling.

“You don't have to read a book to know it's popular, Bozer.”

“I’ll look into the cold storage angle,” Leanna says. 

“In the meantime, plot us out a three hour radius, by car, bus, and plane,” Jack says. “Could he fly with that, Mac?”

“If he carried it on with him,” Mac says. “He’d have to get it through security, or hire a private plane.”

“Maybe that’s what those withdrawls were for,” Jack says. “Leanna, start another search for flight patterns of private planes that took off from the closest airport within an hour of the theft.”

“I’ve got something. A plane that left a private airstrip forty-five minutes after the theft, and landed on an airstrip in South Carolina,” Leanna says, looking up from her computer. “Footage around the area shows Luca arriving there ten minutes before the plane took off.”

“Where is the plane now?” 

“It’s back on its home airstrip. It belongs to a private charter company. I’m going to call the owner, see if we can get any information from him.” Leanna says, picking up her cell phone.

“Alright. While you’re doing that, we’ll contact South Carolina authorities and put them on the lookout for Luca. And we’ll have the jet ready to fly down there.”

“This guy’s gonna be very disappointed to hear we already have our own plane,” Leanna says, cupping her hand around her phone. “He’s totally chatting me up trying to sell a deal right now, I can’t get a word in over top.”

“Okay, tell him we’ll be over there in half an hour,” Jack says. 

Leanna finally manages to shout the information over the phone, and then looks up, shaking her head. “At least he’s talkative enough that he’ll probably tell us everything about Luca without us having to threaten him. Right?” 

* * *

THIS BARBECUE WASN’T THE BEST

BUT IT WAS CLOSE

Billy groans, rubbing his stomach. “Ooh. Whose idea was the meat-palooza platter?”

Riley gives him a grimacing smile. “Yours. It had to be.”

“No, I'd never suggest anything so cruel.” Billy says. “Damn, I can put away ribs but that, that was a meal.”

Riley nods, chuckling. “I feel like my whole body's rubbed in spice.”

Billy pulls out his keys, then stops.  _ We parked right here...right? _ He thinks he remembers being worried about the brown pickup beside them hitting them with a door when the owners left. But the truck is still there, and the Bentley is gone. 

“Where the hell is our car?”

“You sure that’s where you parked, babe?” Riley asks. “Why don’t you hit the horn. Maybe it’s just not right there.”

Billy does. There’s no sound. “Nope, Riley, I think someone ripped us off.” He sighs. “Damnit.”

“If I had my rig, I could have pulled sat images, and seen where it went,” Riley says. “But someone said no work on the trip. So the rig is home.”

“What about your phone?” Billy asks. 

“This is my personal one,” Riley says. “Mac destroyed my work one in London. This doesn’t have the capability to load our sat feeds.” She shrugs. “It looks like it’s time to act like the normal people we’re pretending we are and call the cops.” 

* * *

A SMALL TOWN

WHERE THE COPS ARE JUST AS CLICHE AS YOU THINK

Riley watches the police car drive away in a haze of dust, shading her eyes with her hand. 

“Well, Officer Couldn't Care Less isn't gonna lift a finger to help,” Billy says. “I don’t think he was any too eager to help the out of towners.” 

“That’s the problem with small towns like this,” Riley says. “They take care of their own, but if you come from outside, at best, they’d rather just ignore you.”

“Yeah, no kidding.” Billy pulls out his phone. “I'm gonna see if I can get us a flight to Dallas.”

“What? What are you talking about?” 

“Riley, we have no car, we have nothing but what we have on us, and we're stuck in the middle of Arizona somewhere.”

“So we improvise.” Riley grins.  _ Wish Mac was here to see this. _ She’s learned plenty from him.

“So you want to build a car?” Billy asks. 

“No, I was thinking more like ride-share.”  _ Although Mac would have made something out of tumbleweeds and beer bottles. _ She makes a mental note of their resources, she’ll ask Mac what he would have done the next time she sees him.

“To Dallas?”

“Well, why not? It'll be a part of the adventure. Billy, one thing I have learned from taking trips with Jack, if you take the easy route you make no memories.” Riley chuckles. “What are we gonna remember from a plane ride, huh? Because unless we almost die again, which I have no desire to do, I highly doubt there’s going to be any moments for the scrapbook.”

“Oh I get it. You’re superstitious!” Billy says with a laugh. “The last time we were on a plane together, it almost fell out of the sky, so now you’re afraid to fly with me!”

“That’s not...okay, maybe that’s a little true. Blame Jack and his many, many superstitious thoughts. It rubs off.” 

She pulls out her phone and opens a rideshare app, she got it a while ago but hasn’t really used it all that much. She types in their location, pacing around until the spotty cell service kicks in.  _ I really hate using normal personal phones rather than Phoenix tech. Sometimes I forget all the priviledges that come with the job.  _

“Huh, look at that. A ride a half a mile away. Done. Easy.”

“You better hope he’s not a serial killer,” Billy says, glancing at the name on the app that Riley’s just clicked on.

“If he is, he’ll never know what hit him. A trained government agent and a bail bondsman in his car would probably throw him off his game a little. And look at it this way, it would definitely be an adventure that would make this trip memorable.”

“You know, you got me there,” Billy says. “It would be memorable.”

“See, that’s the way to look at the positives,” Riley says with a chuckle. “I’ll teach you yet.”

“I bet you will.”

“What are you smiling about?” Riley asks. 

“I'm just thinking about the look on your face when you see your surprise.”

A car flies past on the road, engine roaring. Riley covers her eyes at the cloud of dust, but stops when she recognizes the charcoal metal-flake paint job.  _ What the hell? _

“Did you see that?” She asks. 

“I do now.”

Just then, a small blue four-door car pulls up in the driveway of the restaurant, and the window rolls down, the driver leaning out to glance at the two of them.

“Hey, are you Riley?” 

“Follow that Bentley.” Riley jumps in the backseat, pulling Billy in with her.

“A-Are you serious?” The guy looks like a kid, maybe college age, and he also looks really freaked out. Riley’s sure this wasn’t at all the gig he was expecting.

“I got a five-star rating if you don’t lose him,” Riley says. The guy looks unconvinced.

“And - and 67 bucks if you step on it right now,” Billy offers, pulling out his wallet and glancing through it.

“Okay, you got it!” Tires squeal as the car pulls out of the lot, heading in the direction of the dust cloud. 

* * *

SOUTH CAROLINA

“Okay, Matty, bad news.” Mac sighs. “By the time the search for Luca began in South Carolina, he was long gone, and no one we’ve spoken to here remembers even seeing him in the first place. All the pilot knows is that Luca hired him to make a special flight, got out, and disappeared.”

“Any luck with the surveillance footage?” Matty asks. 

“Not really,” Leanna replies. “I tracked Luca through the area after he got off the plane, but then we lost him when he entered a small hangar on the outskirts of the airfield that’s now a sort of bar and diner, it didn’t have cameras in it. We're still searching the footage around the area, but it's as if he just disappeared.”

Mac looks up as Jack and Bozer approach, both of them frowning.  _ Well, more bad news I guess.  _ “Hey. Mac, so, we talked to the rental car company here, showed them Luca's picture, but nobody there remembers seeing him, and all their cars are accounted for, we checked out all the drivers and they’re legit,” Jack says. 

Bozer nods. “We’re working on recalling any taxis that worked this airport that day, see if those drivers know anything, but it’s probably a lost cause at this point. He could have had a car waiting for him or gotten an Uber for all we know.”

“It's like he got off the plane and just-disappeared,” Leanna says.

“But here's the thing, he had to have gone somewhere, right?” Jack says. “Unless that virus actually gives people superpowers, and he infected himself and started teleporting. Or made himself invisible.”

“Jack, viruses are like radiation. They don’t give you powers, they just make you dead,” Mac insists, shaking his head. But Jack’s ploy to take some of the pressure out of the situation is definitely working. 

“We lost him in the diner, right?” Mac asks. He has a vague idea, and he wants to see if it pans out.

Leanna nods. “Camera caught him coming in the door, but not leaving. 

“Did he go in with anything?” Mac asks. 

“His duffel bag that he carried onto the plane. But before you ask, we didn’t see anyone leaving with a bag.”

“Then he must have left it somewhere inside. Which might help us.” Mac glances at Jack. “You hungry?”

A bell tinkles cheerfully over the counter as Mac pushes the diner door open. The “Layover Diner” is the sort of place Jack likes to frequent when they’re on the road, a sort of hodgepodge of retro and trucker grunge. The beat up wing that forms the countertop, the plane seat booths, and the framed photos of pilots on the wall all give the place a quirky feeling, and the slightly dusty glass and grimy, peanut shell and bottle cap covered floor don’t exactly look like a spot a CDC scientist would feel comfortable. Then again, maybe that’s the point.

Jack walks up to the bartender, a short blond woman with glasses. Her white pin nametag reads “Kat”, and there’s a smear of mustard on her pale blue blouse. “Hey, two root beers, please? And a ginger ale, and orange soda if you’ve got it.” 

The woman nods and walks away. Mac knows it seems like Jack’s wasting time, but this is his technique to butter up the people he wants information from. Restaurant owners are far more likely to want to talk to a paying customer.

When the drinks come, Jack slides one root beer down the table to Leanna, and hands the other to Mac, the orange soda to Bozer, and keeps the ginger ale for himself, since he’s going to be driving. 

Mac turns the condensation-covered glass bottle around in his hands. He takes a small sip, but the taste seems off, and whatever it is burns his throat. He frowns, there shouldn’t be enough carbonation in root beer to do that. Leanna doesn’t seem bothered, so Mac continues to play with the rim of his bottle, listening to Jack talk.

“Hey, you seen a guy come in here, carrying a duffel bag, yesterday?”

“Yesterday?” The woman says. “I wasn’t on yesterday. You’ll need to talk to my brother.” She yells into the back. “Hey Harley, there’s some folks here wanna talk to ya!” 

A tall, burly guy with an apron and a bushy beard steps out from behind the divider that separates the kitchen. “What is it y’all are askin’ about?”

“This guy,” Jack says. He holds up a picture of Dr. Luca. “He’s wanted for questioning in a national security matter.” There’s no time to beat around the bush with some false story these people probably won’t believe anyway.

“Oh, that guy?” Harley says. “Came in here all in a hurry, rushed into the bathroom. Don’t think he ordered nothin’, though. And it was dinner rush, so I didn’t exactly notice if he left. Too busy taking orders.”

“Well, it looks like no one saw him leave,” Leanna says. “He can’t still be in here though. Right?”

“He had to get that canister to his cold storage unit, fast,” Mac replies. “He wouldn’t have stayed, but...I want to check the last place he was seen.”

“Okay,” Jack says. 

They open each of the bathroom stalls, but there’s no sign of anything. “Guess he's not hiding in there,” Bozer says. 

Mac frowns, glacing closer into the toilet bowls and around the edges, before moving on to the line of three sinks.“Dude, I don’t think he flushed himself down the toilet. Or slid down a sink drain. He ain’t Stuart Little,” Jack says.

“Jack, what is it with you and book references today?” Bozer asks. Jack just shrugs.

“Look.” Mac points into the sink.

“What? The spit? The soap residue? The disgusting rust rings?” Jack asks.

“Hair.” Mac reaches into the sink with his knife’s tweezers, holding up some dark, slightly wavy strands. “Two different lengths. Luca had a beard and mustache, right?” 

“According to his CDC ID, yeah.” 

“I don’t think he does anymore.”  _ I thought this might have been the case.  _ “Luca changed his appearance. That's how he disappeared. He probably had extra clothes in the duffel, and put them on over his own, then hid the bag under his jacket. Added twenty pounds to his appearance and also changed the image we were looking for.”

He reaches into the trash can and pulls out the bag, hoping it wasn’t emptied at closing. But there’s only a few things inside it. He rushes out to the front counter.

“Do you have a dumpster here?”

“Around back, kid. Why?” But Mac’s already on his way.

Jack and Bozer catch up to him when he’s halfway inside. “Whoa, hey, we already know he shaved his face, why you dumpster diving?”

“Still one more thing I have to know,” Mac says. The dumpster doesn’t smell as bad as he was expecting a restaurant one in southern heat to be.  _ Maybe I’m slowly going nose blind to the smell of trash.  _ He starts tossing out bags, hoping to find one of the white clear plastic ones that were in the bathroom trash cans. 

“Okay, hey, hey, we making a mess just to make a mess, or what?” Jack asks. 

“No, no. There might be…” Mac sighs when he plunges one hand into something slimy and greasy… “something here.”

“Yeah, four other diseases that oughta be locked up in the CDC labs too,” Jack grumbles. 

Finally, Mac comes across a bag that looks like the one he found inside. He opens it up, digging through wads of paper towel and kleenex and a few other things he tries to ignore, until he finds something out of place. “Bingo.”

“No way. Is that a bag of hair?” Bozer asks. 

“He didn’t just shave his face, he changed his hairstyle too. He really wanted to make sure no one would be able to follow him.” 

Mac washes up inside, after tossing all the trash back in the dumpster, while Leanna and Bozer sit down at a booth and work on a composite of Luca’s new look. 

“Okay, so, using Riley’s prediction modeling software, and taking into account the length of hair cut off, the shaved mustache and beard, here’s what Luca should look like now,” Leanna says when Mac rejoins them. “Mac, did you find any hair dye?”

“No, and no traces in the sink,” Mac says. 

“Then this is who we’re looking for.” Leanna holds up her computer. “I’ll start running this through Friar right now.” 

Mac nods. He frowns, glancing at his watch. It’s not that late, but he feels exhausted, like he could lie down across one of these booths and fall asleep. Maybe he just needs some caffeine. He orders a coffee, dumps in some sugar, and swallows it down as fast as he can, the scalding warmth bringing back some level of awareness and focus. 

“Okay, I just found footage of a post-makeover Luca getting onto a bus downtown. He's no movie star, but that's what he looks like now.” Leanna says, pulling up the image. “Unfortunately, this bus goes through a rural area to the next town, and by the time it reached that station, Luca was no longer on it. 

“Okay, so now we know the route he took. But why come here?” Jack asks. “This isn’t exactly a perfect ground zero to release a catastrophic virus, and we also don’t have any proof a deal was going down to sell it to another buyer.” 

“I might be able to answer that,” Leanna says. “It took a little wrangling, because it was international, but a Canadian medical company shipped a cold storage freezer to an address in Columbia, South Carolina a week before the virus was stolen. Looks like Luca was planning to hold onto that virus for a while.”

“Okay. That's where we're going. And probably where he’s going too,” Jack says. Mac stands up, wincing at the ache in his shoulders and hips.  _ Those old plane seats really are uncomfortable. _

* * *

“Okay, you can let us out here,” Riley says, watching as the Bentley pulls into the parking lot of a large garage. 

Their driver nods, parking the car and opening the door. He holds out his hand, and Billy pulls the money out of his wallet and hands it over with a slight grimace. The blue car pulls away, and Riley and Billy walk the last half a block to the building, crouching behind a tangle of scrub trees and old car bumpers alongside the fence. 

Riley brushes her sweaty curls off her forehead and glances at where the wide doors are opening and someone is motioning the Bentley’s driver inside. The sun is beating down, baking her back and shoulders, and a hot dry wind kicks up a slight sprinkle of sand, leaving grit on her tongue and in her eyes. 

She’s not a big fan of desert climates. And not even really for herself, and the inconveniences of checking for deadly creatures in your boots or finding sand in uncomfortable and sometimes unmentionable places. It’s for what happens to Jack when they have to work in these climates. He gets a thousand-yard stare, and her nights are spent waking to muffled screams and sometimes sobs. The desert is where Jack Dalton’s worst nightmares live, which is enough of a reason for Riley to develop a severe animosity toward it. If it’s not the familiar mesquite and cattle scent of the Dalton ranch, she doesn’t want to spend any more time in it than necessary.

She shakes off the thoughts. Jack isn’t here, Billy is. And they just watched their car disappear. 

The low building is alive with the hum of machinery, the telltale sounds of a mechanic’s work. Riley frowns at the sight of stripped car frames in the back and boxes and crates sitting along the side, some filled visibly with car parts. 

“Well, this is clearly a chop shop. Not like we can knock on the door and politely ask for the car back.”

Billy nods. “And the boys in blue took two hours to file their report. By the time the police get here, that car'll be in a million pieces.” 

Riley reaches down, testing the edge of the fence. It’s buried in the sand, but a few scuffed handfuls later, she can reach the lower edge and pull part of it up. She turns to Billy with a grin.

“Riley, I don’t really like that look in your eyes. What are you planning that I’m gonna immediately tell you is a terrible idea?” 

“We’re going to steal our car back.”

* * *

“What's the address, Bozer?” Jack asks.

“8666. That’s not ominous at all, right?” Bozer asks. “You think he picked it on purpose?” He’s sure the doctor picked this spot on purpose. It’s a run down little neighborhood trailer park, half RVs and half crumbling doublewides.

“Maybe we can ask him ourselves,” Jack says. “8662, 64... Okay. Next building?” They drive past a vacant lot, but the next building, Bozer can see, is 8670. 

“Or not.” Jack puts on the brakes, and turns around in a driveway. 

“What, the doctor had the cold storage unit delivered to a parking lot?” Leanna asks. 

Jack shakes his head. “Maybe not. Leanna, pull the sat views of this from two days ago.”

Bozer watches while she does it. There’s something in the lot. A small, beat-up RV.

“That’s it. You could definitely install a cold storage unit in an RV,” Mac says.

“Really?” Bozer asks.

“Yeah. Carlos is using one right now as a mobile clinic, since there’s still a shortage of usable buildings in Puerto Rico and a lot of people need vaccines and other treatments, and it also lets him travel around the island wherever he’s needed. It’s got the space to have an exam bed, a kitchen that can be turned into a scrub room, and the right kind of electrical hookups to install some portable medical equipment. Like cold storage units.” Mac frowns. “I think we just figured out how Luca set up a mobile lab.”

“Leanna, you said Luca had a bunch of withdrawals from his savings in the days leading up to the theft. And that was way more than that pilot got paid.”

“That would make sense. Paying for an RV in cash would keep him off the radar.”

“There’s a shed over here,” Bozer says. “It looks like it’s still on this piece of property. Maybe Luca used it to store something we can use to find him.”

“It’s a long shot, but it’s all we’ve got,” Jack says. He taps his comms. “Matty says she's got a satellite on our position. And thermal imaging confirms no heat signatures inside.”

“So our doctor isn't in there, but the stolen virus might be?” Bozer says.

“Which is exactly why I don't think it's such a good idea for us just to go charging in there right now,” Leanna says. 

“Agreed. There is no way that place has the level of biocontainment this virus requires,” Jack says. “I for one have no desire to be Zombified, but apparently Leanna and I are the only sane ones here.” 

“I just need a few things,” Mac says, heading for a trash can for the second time that day. He rummages around it and a recycling bin, fishing out some papers, plastic bottles, and other assorted odds and ends. Bozer shakes his head.  _ Good thing Mac’s not a germaphobe. _ Bozer has no idea how many dumpsters Mac’s dug through by now. And probably a lot more he doesn’t know about.

“Mac...whatever you’re thinking, don’t. Some paper and plastic isn’t gonna keep out the killer flu.” 

“It’s not airborne,” Mac replies. 

“Not the point, and besides, it could work like that too and they just don’t know it. Mac, this isn’t safe. Not by a long shot.”

Mac sighs. “I know. The interior may be completely contaminated, but we don't have time to wait for a hazmat team.” He glances at their van. “But we do have a first aid kit with masks and gloves, and this is just an added layer of breathing protection. As long as we keep all our skin covered, we should be safe.” 

“Should be?” Jack says. “I don’t like to operate on should be here. Not with something like this.” 

“The longer we wait, the longer that virus is in the wind, and the longer Luca has to weaponize and sell it, or to screw up and release it.” 

Jack sighs. Bozer knows he can’t argue with that logic. Mac hands around his makeshift masks, along with the items from the first aid kit. All four of them secure on their protective gear and then Mac quickly picks the padlock on the shed door. 

Inside, the building is dark, but almost empty aside from some random lawn tools and a small counter space. Or at least it looks that way until Bozer switches on his flashlight and illuminates a pile ashes in the corner.

“Guys, I got a pile of something here. I think it's been burned.”

“Okay, what's that, now?” Jack asks, as Mac reaches into the ashes and pulls out something small.

“It's a...it's a burned vial,” Mac says. 

“A burned vial? Maybe he burned the virus, had a change of heart?” Bozer asks. He’s not sure even he buys that though.  _ It’s never what they do in the movies.  _

“No, I think he transferred the virus to a new container, then burned this one to sanitize it,” Mac says. “Which...is good for us, in a way. It means he cares about whether or not this hits the general population. Or at least when it hits.” He frowns. “If it is about to be turned into a bioweapon, he has a plan for when and where he’ll release it, and he doesn’t want anyone to get infected before that.”

“Should we even be in here?” Leanna asks. 

“We’ll be fine. It’s spread by contact and we’re wearing gloves,” Mac says. “Just don’t let any exposed skin contact anything in here. We’ll change our clothes as soon as we get out. Hazmat should be here by then and we can do decon.” Bozer sees him shiver a little.  _ I’m not the biggest fan of decon either, but for him, getting naked in front of a bunch of complete strangers is a whole lot worse than just humiliating.  _

“Guys, I got a laptop over here,” Leanna says, tossing aside a pile of rags to reveal the shiny silver surface. 

Jack frowns. “Too bad Riley's off road-tripping with Billy. We could really use her boopity-boop skills right about now.”

“Actually, she did teach me a few things,” Leanna says. She glances at the computer. “He hit it hard enough to crack the screen and wreck the housing, but the hard drive is still intact. I’ll plug into it and start scanning it to mine.” 

“Why would he leave this?” Bozer asks. 

“Because if you don’t know exactly what you’re doing, this can be tracked,” Leanna replies. “Anything with a wifi chip in it can be traced as soon as it comes in contact with a network. He probably didn’t want to risk it. I wouldn’t either, not unless someone like Riley got their hands on it first.” 

“Yikes.” Bozer shudders. “That’s creepy.”

“ _ Not _ as creepy as a dude running around with a killer flu,” Jack reminds him. “But if he didn’t protect this thing from getting tracked, he’s probably not super computer-fluent. So hopefully he didn’t scrub it too well for Leanna to find something.” 

“You’re right, Jack,” Leanna replies. “He deleted his files, but he didn’t destroy the hard drive. Which means…” She starts typing again. “I can probably reconstruct some things. Maybe enough to get us a lead.” 

“Just do it as quickly as you can,” Jack says. 

Bozer rests a hand on Leanna’s shoulder. Her muscles are tense. Bozer gently rubs his thumb over her shoulder and neck.  _ I know, having all this pressure on you to find a way to save the world is never easy. _ Normally it’s Riley who’s on the clock on her rig. It has to be strange for Leanna, this isn’t usually her job. 

Finally, she looks up, and nods for the others to come see what she has. 

“There was a lot of useless information, but there were also some conversations in his emails and some paperwork regarding a land purchase. This address is to a location in West Virginia. It’s being rented under...under what looks like a shell company Luca set up.”

“That’s probably where he’s taking his lab,” Jack says. “Send that to Matty, have her get us some sat surveillance on it. And we’ll pull out as soon as we can.” 

The hazmat vans pull up, and after a quick scrubdown and change of clothes, they’re on the road again, headed for their jet and the West Virginia site. 

The flight isn’t long, and Bozer can’t relax enough to sleep or even put in his headphones and continue his audiobook. He feels as jittery as if he’s had ten cups of coffee. And come to think of it, he needs to use the bathroom about that badly too.

He stands up and walks to the bathroom. The door is pulled shut, but not locked, but when he opens it, Leanna is inside, bent over the sink. Bozer starts to apologize and back out, before he realizes what he’s seeing. 

Leanna is scrubbing her hands almost obsessively. Bozer frowns at the sight.  _ And I thought Jack was being weird about all this. _ But Jack tends toward the joking approach to worry, with his constant comments about the zombie apocalypse. Leanna actually looks paranoid. 

“Are you okay?” He asks.

“I will be when we catch that guy. And get the virus back where it belongs.” Leanna‘s voice is shaking.

“What is the deal with you and this case?”

Leanna sighs, sitting down on the closed lid of the toilet and staring at the floor in front of her. “I had meningitis when I was fifteen. I almost died,” she says, so quietly Bozer almost misses it. “It damaged part of my brain that controlled my left leg, and I literally had to re-learn to walk, another part of my brain compensates for what got destroyed. I’m not scared of the common cold, Bozer. But I am scared as hell of something that can mess me up that badly. Whether it’s messing up your brain, or affecting your heart...what some things can do to you…”

“Hey, I get it. That’s...that’s scary.” Bozer says. “I’d be scared too if that happened to me.” He rests a hand on hers, feeling the cold wetness of hand sanitizer. He can smell the pomegranate scent from it. “We’re going to be okay. We are.” 

* * *

Riley sneaks up alongside the windows of the chop shop, cringing at the feeling of the sand that made its way into her shirt while she was crawling under the fence. 

She gives Billy a thumbs-up when she sees the Bentley in the middle of the garage. It looks like, for all the cars, this is a small-time operation. She can only see three guys inside, and as she watches, a heavyset man in welding gear counts off a stack of bills and hands a handful over to the two others, who walk toward the door. Riley dives behind a crate of brakes and hubcaps as the door opens and the men walk out, climbing into silver Impala and driving away.

“Okay, there's still time, but we got to move fast.”

Billy glances in through the window. “Yeah, before Crumbs McGee gets powdered sugar everywhere.” He nods to the welding gear guy, who’s eating a donut while looking in and around the Bentley. “You know how hard that is to clean?”

“I meant before he takes the car apart.” Riley grins, this reminds her of working with Jack.

“That, too.”

“All right, we need to get him out of the garage and away from the car. Question is, how?” Riley looks around.  _ Mac would know how to make a fantastic distraction from all these crates of parts.  _ The problem is, she isn’t Mac.

Billy’s wince draws her back to the window, just as a loud noise begins from inside. 

“No, no, no, no, no. He's got an impact wrench going. I-I can't watch this.” Billy turns away.

“That gives me an idea,” Riley says, glancing toward the wires that lead down from the electric poles to the building, and the small side window nearby.

“All right.”

Riley forces open the window, letting herself and Billy into what looks a bit like a break room. There’s a rickety table and chairs, a few lockers, a grimy sink, and along the wall, what she wants, the master switches for the building’s electric. 

She turns them off, and listens to the slowing whine of the tools out front powering down, unlocking the second door and slipping through with Billy while the mechanic is preoccupied trying to figure out what’s wrong with his impact wrench. 

“Well, that’s one way to do it.” 

Riley shrugs. “It worked.” 

She edges around crates and half-broken apart cars, watching the man try turning his tool off and on again, checking the power cord, and finally moving toward the door into the electrical room. 

As soon as he’s though it, she slams a toolchest up against it. She can hear the strained curses from the other side as the man realizes he’s been had, but he can’t move the toolchest and he’s not going to be able to fit through the window she and Billy used. 

“Check the car, make sure everything's in one piece,” She says quickly, grabbing a battery and some jumper cables. 

“What are you doing? 

“I'm buying us some time. Using a trick Mac taught me.” Riley begins attaching part of the jumper cables to the doorknob. She hears a shout when the man grabs the electrified handle, then a thud and groan. 

There’s the hum of an engine starting, and then Billy honks the horn. “Get in!” He shouts. Riley does, and they speed away from the garage, stopping long enough for them to unlatch the gate.  _ Don’t exactly want to bust through it in this baby. _ Riley’s all for smashing gates, but not in million dollar cars. 

“Hooo, yeah, baby!” Billy shouts. “Just call us Bonnie and Clyde.”

“It was our car, Billy. They stole it from us.”

“So does that make us Robin Hoods, then?”

“Shut up.” 

* * *

WEST VIRGINA FORESTS

NOT QUITE THE CLASSIC SETTING FOR MAD SCIENTIST’S LAB

“Well, this is it,” Jack says, pulling up at the entrace to an RV park and campground. “Sat view puts the RV we found in South Carolina right here.”

Mac nods, staring into the dark woods. At night, everything looks ominous, and twisted, and terrifying.

“Hazmat’s en route. Again. Mac, please tell me we’re gonna stay put and wait for them,” Bozer says. 

“We can’t take that risk,” Mac replies. 

“He’s not gonna release it in the woods, dude. That would be stupid,” Jack says.

“Meeting a buyer here wouldn’t be.” Mac shakes his head.  _ If we wait, and something happens, I could never forgive myself _ . Granted, if this thing gets out, he’ll probably be  _ dead _ , but still. He can’t stand the thought of watching any of his friends die.

“Fine, then, let’s go take him.” Jack readies a dart gun, filled with a sedative. He’s been very vocal that he’d rather just take Luca down with a bullet, but without knowing the man’s plans, Phoenix would prefer him alive for an interrogation. And the less bullets that end up flying in the vicinity of a lethal virus contained in who knows what, the better.

“Let me go first,” Mac says. “I’ll draw him out so you can knock him out.” 

“What the hell? No way!” Jack retorts. “I ain’t lettin you walk up there without backup.”

“Jack, if he’s a terrorist, he’ll be jumpy. And there’s no sense in all of us running the risk of infection. I’d rather it be me than Leanna or Bozer or you.”

“Well, I’d rather it be me.”

“It will be, for sure, if you go up there and go all Jack Dalton on him,” Mac says. “I can do this. I’ll lure him out and it’ll be fine.”

“Mac, are you sure about this?” Leanna asks.

“Yeah. I am.” Mac steps out of the van and into the trees, trying not to think about the crawling feeling of being watched. A twig snaps under his shoe and he jumps. He’s a city boy, and the woods aren’t someplace he feels confident or comfortable, especially not where there might be bears  _ and _ crazy virologists with deadly bioweapons.

There’s the distinct sound of a second set of footfalls in the trees _ .  _ He knows it’s not Luca, Jack’s footsteps are distinct. And he knows Jack intended for him to hear him there. Otherwise he’d be soundless.  _ He wants me to know I have backup. _

Up ahead, in one of the clearings, he can see a faint light. It must be the RV. 

Jack steps up beside him in the trees. “Hey hoss, you sure you don’t want me with you?”

“I’m okay, Jack.” Mac hopes he sounds convincing.  _ There shouldn’t be anyone in there but me if this goes wrong.  _ The good thing is, they are isolated. If he and Luca are the only infected cases, and a team can quarantine them, then the virus shouldn’t spread too far. 

“I don’t like this, Mac.”

“I’m not sure I like it either. But I don’t want to spook him.”

“Just stick to the plan, Get him to stick his neck out, and I’ll put his lights out.” Jack pats his gun. “Then we’ll let hazmat grab him and the virus and high-tail it back home.” 

Mac nods, stepping out of the woods and toward the small circle of light.

He knocks on the RV’s door. “Excuse me, do you have some toilet paper I could bor-” 

“No. Sorry, I really think you should try somewhere else.”

“Hey, man, it’s not like I want a whole roll…”

“I said no. Go on.”

Mac can tell he’s not going to get anywhere with faking a ruse to get in. “Dr. Luca?”

The door opens a crack, and Mac feels himself bodily yanked in. In his ear, Jack’s hissing.

“Mac, I’m coming.”

“No,” Mac hisses back, hoping Luca doesn’t notice, even as the man yanks the zipties out of his back pocket.  _ So much for maybe being able to restrain him fast _ . “I got this.” He raises his hands slowly. “See, I’m not armed. I’m not here to hurt you, doctor.”

“No, but they want to hurt us all. They don’t care what it would do!” The man’s eyes are wild-looking. Mac frowns. This doesn’t sound like a terrorist bent on destruction. It sounds more like someone with a conspiracy theory. Or one that’s less theory and more fact.

“I don’t understand,” Mac says quietly, trying to calm the situation. 

“They’re going to turn it into a weapon!” Luca shouts. “I won’t let them do it!”

“Then what are you doing?” Mac asks. He glances around the room, for anything he can use to incapacitate and restrain the man. There’s a lamp on a table to his left, if he can just move toward it slowly...

“Creating a vaccine.” 

“Couldn’t you have done that at the lab?”

“Not after they sent it to the DOD.” Luca’s hands and voice are shaking. “My team was studying the virus, working on a cure, working on a vaccine. And then we got notice that our whole project would be suspended since our test vials were being shipped to another site. But I saw the paperwork, and it wasn’t a CDC site. It was DOD. The biological weapons development unit.” 

“So you decided to steal it before they got their hands on it, and figure out a cure yourself.”

“Once I found out where they were shipping it, I knew I didn’t have long before they turned it into the biological equivalent of a nuclear deterrent.”

Mac is so close to the lamp now. “We don’t want to do that, Luca. I promise.”

“Maybe you don’t. But your agency might. I can’t take that chance. I’m sorry, Mr. MacGyver.” The next second, Luca raises a gun to his temple and pulls the trigger.

Mac flinches, cringing away from the sound of the gunshot and the blood.  _ What...did he… _

“Mac!” Jack is screaming in his ear.

“I’m good, Jack, I’m good. That was Luca. He...uh…” Mac wipes a few specks of blood off his face. Then he sees the device on the floor. “Jack, he had a dead man switch. This whole place is gonna blow.”

“Get out of there, Mac, get out of there now.” He can tell Jack is running toward him. Probably has been since the gunshot.

“Maybe I can…”

“No! Mac, don’t even try. Just run.” Jack’s voice is tight. “Or damn it I’m gonna come in there and drag you out.”

Mac knows Jack isn’t kidding. So he shoves the door open and runs. 

The blast goes off when he’s halfway across the clearing, throwing him stumbling forward. He turns to look back at the vehicle engulfed in flames, then toward Jack, who’s covering the distance between them with a few long strides.

“Jack, he...he…” Mac chokes on the words.

“Mac, it’s not your fault. Luca knew what he was doing, and there was nothing you were gonna be able to do to convince him that wasn’t the solution.” 

Mac nods, stepping forward for the hug he knows he needs right now. And then he sneezes.  _ No. Oh, no. No.  _

* * *

DALLAS

RILEY HAS NO IDEA WHOSE HOUSE THIS IS

Billy parks the slightly dusty Bentley outside a modest ranch house in a small cul-de-sac. Riley frowns. 

“Is this the surprise?”  _ He did  _ not _ buy us a house. That’s not possible, right? Not when he knows I’m not ready to commit to an engagement. Living together is just as huge a step. _

She realizes she’s starting to freak out when she hears Billy’s voice cut through her thoughts and realizes she hasn’t heard a word.

“What?”

“Well, you remember when I was telling you Elwood and I got to talking about you when we were together?”

“Yeah.”  _ Calm down, you’re overreacting. _

“Well, one of his biggest regrets was turning his back on his family. And not just you.” Billy steps out of the car, then opens Riley’s door. “Come on.”

“Really, what's going on?”

Billy smiles. “Well, when you were born, Elwood and his mom weren't talking. He didn't want to try to fix it until he got his act together.”

Riley’s slowly starting to understand. “Whose house is this? Billy, is this…”

“You'll see.” He knocks, and a few moments later the door opens. A woman with curly grey hair and a pair of beat up overalls answers it. 

“Yes?”

Billy speaks up immediately. “Hello. Ms. Dolores, I'm Billy Colton. We talked on the phone.”

The woman’s face goes from concern to a joyful enthusiasm. “Yes, of course. Is this...?”

“Yes, ma'am.” Billy smiles. “Dolores, I want to introduce you to someone very special. This is your granddaughter, Riley. Riley, meet your grandma.”

Riley gasps, choking on the unexpected tears that are flooding down her face. “I've-I've always wanted to…” She sniffles and wipes her face with the back of her hand.  _ I kept thinking about tracking her down. I could have. But I always figured she stayed away from us for a reason. And that maybe I wasn’t welcome.  _

Dolores laughs, pulling Riley into a tight hug. “It's okay. Honey, it’s okay. Now come on in and tell me all about yourself. I’ve missed so much. And you are welcome too, young man. I’ve got some biscuits with your name on them.” 

Riley sits down at the kitchen table, a cup of coffee in one hand and a plate of fresh biscuits in the other.

“You are so beautiful,” Dolores says, reaching out to twist a lock of Riley’s curly hair in her fingers. “I wish I would have gotten to see you grow up. Oh honey.”

“I wish you’d been there, too.” Riley says. “I always wondered. Why you stayed away.”

Dolores sighs. “There was bad blood between me and your daddy. I didn’t want to make things worse.” Riley nods. “But anyway, enough about what can’t be mended. Tell me, what are you doing with yourself? You seem happy.”

“I’m a tech consultant,” Riley says. “For a think tank in Los Angeles.” Now that Diane knows the truth, Jack’s finally totally dropped the tile sales cover. “I really like it, and it’s actually pretty cool. They’ve sent me all over the world for conferences and stuff.”

“Wow. Doing such amazing things. I’m so proud of you.” 

Riley’s phone buzzes, and she pulls it out, glancing at the message.  _ I wouldn’t, but I put it on do not disturb when we came inside, and the only people who can get through that are Matty, Jack, and Mac.  _

The text is short, simple, and a dagger to the heart. She gasps, nearly dropping her coffee cup. “Grandma, Billy, I’m so sorry. But I have to go home right now.”

The few words from the text message from Matty feel like they’ve burned into her retinas.  _ Mac was infected on an op. Virus potentially lethal. Transported to Phoenix Med for treatment. _

* * *

Jack’s heart kicked into overdrive the second he heard the gunshot. “Mac!” He breaks cover and starts running toward the RV.

“I’m good, Jack.” Mac’s panting. “I’m good. That was Luca. He...uh…” Jack doesn’t need to hear. He can already picture the scene. And then Mac’s breathing ratchets into fear. “Jack, he had a dead man switch. This whole place is gonna blow.”

“Get out of there, Mac, get out of there now.” Jack honestly doesn’t think the kid will do it. Mac’s going to sacrifice himself, trying to stop this thing.  _ But if Luca was what he claimed, then he would have made the bomb to destroy the virus, not spread it. Mac won’t do any good even if he can disarm it. _ “Don’t even try. Just run.” Jack wonders if he can get to the door before the bomb goes off, get Mac out. “Or damn it I’m gonna come in there and drag you out.”

And then the door opens, and Mac’s figure is silhouetted in the light for a split second, before he’s down the steps and running toward Jack. And then an explosion behind him sends him reeling and stumbling, and Jack watches the RV go up in flames.  _ Luca wired his bomb to the propane tanks.  _ Jack would have gone with that himself.

He hurries toward Mac, who’s swaying on his feet and looks kind of shell-shocked. There’s blood in his hair and on his face, black in the firelight. 

“Jack, he...he…” Mac chokes on the words.

“Mac, it’s not your fault. Luca knew what he was doing, and there was nothing you were gonna be able to do to convince him that wasn’t the solution.” Jack drops his gun, reaching out to pull the kid in close.  _ Damn, that’s gonna hurt him for a while. Watching someone just end it like that, right in front of him. _ Mac tries to hard to save lives, being even indirectly responsible for someone ending theirs is going to be something he finds a way to blame himself for.  _ I’m gonna be holding him for a long time. _

Mac sneezes. Then goes white.  _ Damn it, is he hurt, did he catch shrapnel somewhere? _

“Mac?” Jack asks. He starts to lean in to see what’s wrong, and then stops as Mac holds his hands up, eyes wide and wild, rolling like a scared horse’s.

“Jack, stay away from me. Stay away.”

“What the hell kiddo?”

“I’m sick.” Jack sighs; and then it hits him.  _ Sick, sick. As in freaky deadly zombie virus sick.  _

“No, no, no, kiddo, you can’t be.”

“I was in his lab,” Mac insists. “If he accidentally contaminated it...he wasn’t really set up for the kind of containment it needed.” He shivers. “He was touching my skin when he pulled me inside, and then his blood got all over me too…”

“Oh Mac.” Jack’s hands hover, farther away than he’s used to being able to fuss over his kid, but he can’t stop the action. “I thought it had a longer incubation period?”

“I did too…” Mac coughs, grimacing, a couple tears starting to slide down his cheeks. Jack doesn’t know if they’re from pain or fear. It doesn’t matter. His boy is suffering, and Jack can’t do a single thing to make it better. “Maybe it’s from the blood? Or if I was exposed to it somewhere else along the way.”  _ If you were, we all were. Right? _ But Jack can’t help but wonder. If there was a torn glove somewhere along the line, a brush of skin in the wrong place at the wrong time…

Jack knows the kid’s mind is clutching at every available explanation. Any possibility, no matter how far fetched. Because he doesn’t know how to understand this, and neither does Jack.  _ How did this happen? _ It seems impossible, but it’s not, because there’s Mac, sneezing and shivering in front of him.  _ He’s sick. We have no idea how it happened, but it did. _ But Jack still can’t quite bring himself to believe it. 

“Mac, this can’t be happening. It can’t be.”  _ We did everything as best we could. And Luca, after what I heard...he would have been careful not to infect himself. Unless that’s why he didn’t want Mac in the trailer, he was gonna find the cure even as he was dying… _ But still, Jack doesn’t think it’s possible for a virus to hit that fast. It’s been less than ten minutes since Mac went up to the trailer.  _ But not since we were in that shed. _

Mac coughs and shudders. “Just...stay away from me. The hazmat team will be here soon, right?”

Jack nods. It’s probably the only reassurance he can give the kid. That at least Mac won’t infect anyone else. 

“T-tell them what happened.” Mac whispers, curling up on the ground as a shiver wracks through him. 

“You’re not croakin’ on me before they even get here,” Jack says. “Come on, Mac, the good doctor said it was only a ninety-nine percent mortality rate, and I swear you’ve survived way too many things that shoulda killed you, you gotta be the one safe percentage.”

“That’s not…” Mac cuts off with a ragged cough, “how it works.” 

“Hazmat’s here,” Bozer says, rushing up with Leanna in tow. “We came as soon as we heard the explosion...Mac?”

“He’s sick,” Jack barks out sharply, more angrily than he intended. “Stay back. Leanna, go get those hazmat guys in here right the hell now.” She nods and runs off. 

“Mac?” Bozer asks weakly.

Mac coughs. 

“How did…”

“I don’t know, Bozer!” Jack shouts. “We might all be sick, damn it. I don’t know where he got it, or how. Just…” Jack sighs. 

“Please, don’t shout. My...my head hurts,” Mac whispers.

“I’m sorry, kiddo, I’m so so sorry.” Jack says gently. “Bozer, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to go off on you like that.”

“No hard feelings, Jack,” Bozer replies quietly. “Mac, how bad is it?”

The only response is another round of harsh, hacking coughs. And then the hazmat team is rushing up, past Jack in blurs of white and yellow, and it feels like the whole world has sped up and slowed down at the same time. 

Jack watches Mac shiver under the gloved hands stripping him for decontamination, wishing he was there to comfort the kid but unable to touch him.  _ Mac’s contaminated. He’s sick. _ Jack will never be able to touch him again. He lets himself be pulled away to scrub down as well, but he can’t help but wonder if Mac knows what’s happening, or if he’s already delirious enough that the hands on his body make his mind return to prison. 

He doesn’t know who called Matty, maybe Leanna, but a phone is handed to him once he’s dried off and dressed in clean scrubs. Matty’s voice is thick with emotion. “They’re under orders to send Mac home in an isolation unit. I want him in Phoenix medical. I’m calling everyone at the CDC who’s worked with this strain, see if there’s anything they can do.”

“Thank you, Matty.” Jack hangs up, then walks over to where Mac is being put into a portable isolation unit. “Kiddo, we’re taking you home. We’re gonna get you back where you belong, okay, and you’re gonna be just fine.”

Mac sneezes and coughs again, curling up. “Okay.”

Jack wants to hold his hand. On the ride to the Phoenix jet, on that too long but too short flight. And all he can do is sit near the isolation unit, his own vitals being consistently monitored since they can’t pinpoint the location of exposure, and talk to Mac.

For a while, they talk about things like physics and stars and Godzilla. But eventually Mac stops talking, claiming his throat is sore, claiming he’s too sleepy. 

“Oh kiddo, oh kiddo. I’m so so sorry.” 

“Why?” Mac’s voice is only a hoarse rasp. His skin is grey, his eyes dull and bright at the same time with fever. “You didn’t…” He coughs harshly, “infect me.”

“It should have been me. Oh Mac, it shouldn’t have been you.” 

Jack almost breaks someone’s arm when they separate him and Mac at Phoenix medical. Jack has to shower again, and change again, and get his blood drawn and a dozen different tests done. So do Leanna and Bozer. And afterward, they all sit in a tony little room and watch Mac inside, sitting on the edge of his bed in a hospital gown, his bare feet hanging over the edge. He looks like a child and Jack wants to cry.

He jumps when the door opens. It’s Matty. She’s wearing a mask and gloves, just in case they’re infected too. But Jack’s fairly sure they aren’t. One, because they should have started showing symptoms, and two, because the universe is just cruel enough to let him watch Angus MacGyver suffer while he can’t even begin to experience the kid’s pain himself. 

Clearly, Matty can tell he’s the one about to crack, because she walks directly over to him. “Jack,” Matty says softly. 

“Matty, don’t say anything. You can’t make this better.” Jack thinks if he opens his mouth again he’ll scream. Instead, he stays where he’s set up his position, as if he’s an overwatch in the Sandbox all over again. Except instead of one of his EOD techs, it’s Mac’s life on the line. And this is one enemy Jack can’t eliminate with a bullet. 

Mac is sitting on his cot in the isolation room, swinging his legs over the side, fiddling with a paperclip, and alternating between coughing up a lung and sneezing fits that left him with a bloody nose half an hour ago. There’s blood in one eye, too, and that freaked Jack the hell out until Mac told him, surprisingly coherently, that it’s just a burst blood vessel from the violent coughs and sneezes.  _ Still makes me flinch every time he looks at us. _ Like Mac’s an extra in a zombie movie.

"Jack. Look at me. Jack! That's an order Dalton!" Jack slowly turns his head, his aching, tear-raw eyes finding Matty’s face. "Listen to me. You feel horrible right now. Would you want that to be Mac instead?" Jack takes a shaky breath. "You know the thing he hates most is feeling helpless. He would be crying and screaming and pounding on that glass. Promising to find a cure. And when he couldn't do it in time, Jack, it would destroy him. Remember Zoe?"

Jack just nods. 

"Losing her crushed him. Losing you would kill him."

"And losing him will kill me, Matty." Jack swallows a ragged sob. "I can't live with that."

"You can. Because that is what Mac would want."

Watching Mac in pain makes him want to tear himself apart.  _ It's not fair that he suffers and I don't. It's not fair. _ He watches a nurse in full protective gear draw off a blood sample and walk away with it. Mac acts as if just that has exhausted him, laying back on his cot and drawing a few sniffling, wheezing breaths. 

"That's my little brother in there," Bozer whispers. "That's my little brother, and there's nothing I can do for him. I can't even hold his hand. I feel so helpless, Jack."

"I do too." 

* * *

MEDICAL ISOLATION ROOM

IT SUCKS THAT THIS IS PROBABLY GOING TO BE THE LAST PLACE MAC EVER SEES

Mac swallows, feeling the action grate on his raw throat. He honestly didn’t think he was going to die from a killer virus. Well, not aside from that first mission, when he was pretty sure he wasn’t going to make it through the day. And was also okay with that. _ It almost seemed like a better option than going back to prison. _

He shivers. He has two blankets already, but he just feels so cold. He knows it’s probably chills, this virus presents like the flu. That’s probably also why he’s aching so badly right now. His whole body, neck to heels, is a throbbing collection of tense muscles and aching bones. His head is pounding too, so badly he’s afraid to sit up or he might throw up.

But when the door opens, he does manage to roll over and prop himself up on one elbow. He frowns. The last nurse who came in was in full protective gear. This one is just in scrubs and a mask.  _ What’s happening? _

The nurse steps up, opening her folder. “Your results tested completely negative for the genetic markers of Specimen 234.” Mac blinks. Did she just tell him he’s  _ not _ infected with the killer virus?  _ I’m not dying? _ “You do, however, have a particularly nasty strain of this year’s flu.” Mac sighs.  _ Of course. _ The vaccines never seemed to work when he was a kid, so why would they now? “Judging by the incubation period, I guess you picked it up about...oh, a week ago, and you’ve probably been sick for a couple days and ignoring it, I’m guessing.” _ A week ago. A cage in the mountains. Cold, biting rain soaking through thin clothes. Phoenix med full of coughing, sneezing techs and secretaries for the past three weeks.  _ As he goes in and out for the usual cuts, bruises, and more. “Also, apparently, you’ve convinced yourself you were infected, which was causing some of the symptoms to be more severe psychosomatically.” 

“Oh.” It’s all he can get out.

“There’s nothing we can do for this other than give you the usual medications, which your file shows copious allergic reactions to, and send you home. If you develop a chest cough, a fever more than 102, begin coughing up pink tinged sputum, or…”

“Any other signs of pneumonia, let you know. I got it.” Mac’s had the flu before. As a kid, that one memorable time when he caught the swine flu during his vigilante years, and then the time in prison. All of them sucked. But he knows what it’s like when it gets really bad. 

The door opens. It’s Jack, with Leanna and Bozer and Matty, and even Riley, right behind him. “They cleared you?” Jack asks, sounding as if he can’t quite believe it and hopes he doesn’t wake up from a dream right now. 

“Yeah. It’s just the flu. The normal flu.” Mac coughs again, worse. “She said I’ve probably had it for a while.”

“Of course you have. Trust you to ignore that you have the freaking flu,” Jack groans. 

“It was just a low-grade fever, probably,” Mac says. “And...and a little nasal drainage. And a sort of sore throat.” 

Jack buries his head in his hands. “Why do I even try?”

“You’ll be happy to know that you’re going to be the only victim of even an imagined case of this virus,” Matty says gently. “Hazmat reported that the West Virginia site is clean, Luca’s bomb destroyed whatever samples of the virus he had.”

“But the CDC still has it. Right?” Bozer asks.

“They do. But, thanks to a few calls I’ve made, they will no longer be handing it over to the DOD,” Matty says. “What’s left of Luca’s team will be free to continue their research on a cure.”

“I think he would have been happy about that,” Leanna says quietly.

“For as insane as he was, Luca was just trying to do the right thing,” Bozer mumbles. “I wanted to hate him for getting Mac sick, but I couldn’t. Not really.”

“Yeah, I don’t really blame him,” Jack says. “I’ve seen too many things weaponized to believe that never would be.” He sighs. “But I’m only saying that cause we know Mac’s not dying.” Mac turns away with another set of harsh, hacking coughs. “Well, not dying of Specimen 234 at least,” Jack amends.

“I guess it’s best for everyone that lab blew,” Bozer says. Matty nods.

Jack reaches down and picks him up bodily off the bed, and Mac snuggles into his warmth. “Hey, kiddo. Let’s go home.” Jack’s arms are strong and warm, and Mac doesn’t care that he probably looks pathetic. He’s alive, and Jack is holding him. It’s okay. 

* * *

MAC’S HOUSE

THEY SHOULD PROBABLY JUST PUT UP A PLAGUE SIGN ON THE DOOR

Jack hates seeing Mac curled up on the couch, sniffling into the growing wad of Kleenex in his hand.  _ Sure, it’s not the damn plague virus, but he gave us all a good scare back there. _ Just because it wasn’t a  _ killer _ flu doesn’t mean it’s not the flu. And Mac being Mac, he’s got a full blown case of it. 

_ Poor kid probably wishes he was dead, it would suck less. _ Mac’s been absolutely miserable. Coughing so hard he’s dislocated ribs, a fever that spikes at 102.8, just shy of absolutely freaking terrifying, and full-body aches that hurt way more than the kid lets on. Jack’s been sticking to his momma’s wisdom of heating blankets in a dryer and tucking them in around Mac when he’s in pain. It seems to soothe the chills too; even though they’re false cold, Mac still shivers and looks absolutely pathetic when they hit. But he won’t let Jack hold him. 

“Can I have some water?” Mac whispers when the most recent coughing spell fades. 

“Of course.” Jack turns to grab a glass.

“I promise I won’t make you sick.” Mac’s voice sounds odd, odder than just the stuffed-nose sore throat rasp it’s been for the past three days. “You can just set it on the table, I won’t touch you.”

“Hey, hold on, kid, how high is that fever of yours?” Jack asks. “You  _ don’t _ have the freaky thing that kills by touch. Remember?” He grabs the thermometer along with the water glass, and the reading he gets draws a frown.  _ That ain’t good. _

Jack pushes Mac’s sweaty hair off his forehead, then rests a damp washcloth over Mac’s head and eyes. The kid sighs and takes a deep breath, but the next second he’s trembling, teeth chattering violently.

Jack doesn’t have time to go heat more blankets, not when his kid is suffering right in front of him. He just reaches down, through the tangled, sweat-dampened heap of blankets, and pulls his kid’s body to him, settling in beside Mac on the couch. Mac’s clothes are soaked, like he’s been dropped in a lake, and the hot sweat immediately starts to soak through Jack’s t-shirt as well. 

He feels Mac relax into him, some of the stiffness leaving the kid’s body. Maybe it’s just the comforting warmth on his sore muscles, but Jack can hear his breathing calming as well. “Hey, kiddo, I coulda been doing this the last few days,” He says gently.

“I didn’t need-” Mac breaks off with a rasping, painful sounding cough. Mickey whines and rests his head on Mac’s lap, and Mac runs one hand over the dog’s head while covering his mouth with the other. 

“It’s not wrong to want someone to take care of you, okay?”

“I shouldn’t need you to.”

“All I hear is James talking.” Jack runs his hand through Mac’s hair gently, grateful that the kid no longer has a panic reaction to that.  _ If Murdoc took away one of the few good ways to comfort him, permanently, I would just have one more reason to put that bastard in the ground. _ “I know no one did this for you after you lost your mom, but that’s all the more reason for me to do it now.” 

“James used to stay away from me when I got sick. He never wanted to catch it too. He had too much work to have to deal with being sick on top of it, that’s what he always said.” Jack bites back an angry retort and squashes a desire to take a wad of those dirty Kleenex and rush right down to the Phoenix holding cells and shove them in the man’s face.  _ He probably basically confined Mac to his room. Poor sick kid all alone with no one to reassure him, no one to take care of him. _ It’s no wonder Mac feels like he has to take care of himself. It’s all he’s known. 

_ And to top it all off, his mom died when he was sick too. And he thought it was his fault because if she hadn’t gone for medication, she wouldn’t have been in the car when it blew up.  _

“Listen, kiddo, I don’t care if you give me the freaking bucolic plague. I’m not going anywhere.”

“Bu-” Mac cuts off with a cough. “Bubonic. Bubonic plague, Jack.”

“Oh. Thought something about that sounded wrong.” 

“I...ahhchoo...really want to know how you knew the word bucolic before you could…” Mac coughs, “think of bubonic.”

“What is that anyway?”

“It’s like...ah...idyllic rural life.” Mac shrugs. “So unless your plague is a pasture full of cows…”

“Okay, maybe I was thinking of the plague on cattle. You know, Moses?  _ Prince of Egypt _ , all that jazz?” 

“Jack, you didn’t know what that...achoo...word was until I just told you.”

“You don’t know my subconscious didn’t know it.”

Mac coughs so hard his chest heaves like his ribs are going to cave in on themselves. “Jack...that was the most confusing sentence I ever heard,” He wheezes once the coughing spell is over. 

“Only because you have a fever, dude. If you were healthy, it woulda made perfect sense.”

“Right.”

“Go to sleep, you nerd.” 

* * *

PHARMACY-NOT THE ONE CLOSEST TO MAC’S HOUSE

HE’S PROBABLY ABOUT TO GET BANNED FROM THIS ONE TOO

“No, no, no, bud. No explosions. Not even a teensy one.” Jack can’t help laughing even though the kid’s spiking a fever that’s clearly making him more than a little delirious. “They won’t like you anymore.”

“But it would be so easy.” Jack can’t tell if Mac is pulling his leg, pretending to be more out of it than he really is, or if the fever has actually fried his brain to the point he’s using the logic of a five year old. “All I have to do is…” he reaches for a bottle of nail polish remover.

“Whoa, whoa, NO, hoss.” Jack sets it back on the shelf, and Mac looks at him with wide, betrayed eyes, like a child who’s had their cereal choice taken away by a parent and replaced with something healthier. “Come on. We can go home and then you can start a fire in the fire pit, how’s that?”  _ I’m not letting him do that in a million years but I gotta get him outta here. _

“Okay. Can I use the heating element from the…” His hands are already straying back to the shelves.

“Tell me all about it in the car, okay kiddo?” Jack says.  _ He’s like hauling around an actual toddler, but I’m afraid to leave him at home. For this exact reason. _ Jack’s genuinely a little afraid he’d have come home to a smoking crater. Feverish Mac is totally unpredictable. 

Mac also didn’t want to be left alone at the house. He seemed worried about Jack, which makes sense given that the last time he watched someone drive away to get something for him when he was sick, they didn’t come back. 

“Okay,” Mac rasps. “What’s that?”

“Honey. Because listening to that sore throat of yours makes mine hurt.” Jack swallows, then swallows again. Nope, he’s not imagining that feeling of a lump in it, or the slight scratchy pain  _ Oh shit. Oh well. Guess that’s the life of a parent. _ He turns back to the shelf. “Uh, maybe I’ll need one more bottle of that cough syrup…”


	10. Matty+Ethan+Fidelity

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, after this is the Christmas Special (Which I want to have out by Christmas but we'll see) and then I'll begin the two-weeks apart posting schedule for 2020! I just feel like having more time will let me do the chapters a little more justice, I've been afraid the last few have been a bit rushed, and I want this fic to be the best it can be! So, happy holidays to all my readers in case I don't get the special out before Christmas! You guys are the best!

###  310-Matty+Ethan+Fidelity

MUMBAI

2002

_ Ethan Reigns has always enjoyed a challenge. _

_ Despite the fact that there’s fifteen guys in this facility, and he’s the only agent crazy enough to mobilize on it, there’s a humming rush of adrenaline in his blood, the feeling he’s come to love. The feeling he only gets when he’s on the razor edge of life and death. _

_ None of the rest of his team were willing to take the risk. “Webber’s been out of contact for too long. And if she’s not dead already, she’s going to wish she was.” Ethan knows going up against these terrorists is a suicide mission. But so was the one that landed Matilda Webber in these men’s hands. And the CIA got her into this mess, so Ethan’s going to get her out. Whether everyone else is with him or just going to sit on their butts and leave one of their own to her fate.  _

_ He doesn’t know Webber personally at all. He’s heard the stories, the whispered rumors, the hushed, reverent “Matty the Hun” that no one would ever dare say to her face.  _

_ So if she couldn’t make it out of this, then things must be bad. He’s more than likely walking into his own death, maybe joining Webber in that. It’s never certain that prisoners will be kept alive, and even if she was, she’s more than likely been tortured for information he knows full well she would never give. This might be a suicide mission for a lost cause. _

_ That doesn’t mean he won’t try.  _

_ He sets down the CD player he’s going to use as a diversion and presses play. He’s at the doors by the time the first notes of “Shake Your Booty” blast out, and when the door opens, he smashes the guard who unlocked it over the head, stepping inside. _

Could have broken in, but it’s so much easier to have them let me in. And to make them come to me instead of going after them.  _ All the guards in the facility are converging on the source of the commotion, and from his hiding place in an alcove, Ethan can pick them off one by one.  _

_ It’s a trick that works for him simply  _ because  _ it’s an incredibly dumbass move, or so his training officers and superiors have called it. No one expects it because it’s so ridiculous. Which means it catches people off guard. Using traditional stealth tactics is fine, but that’s what guys like this terror cell are trained to expect. A single gunman who blares KC and the Sunshine Band isn’t really something anyone expects outside the movies.  _

People can knock stuff like that as unrealistic all they want. But unrealistic is exactly what it takes to win.  _ Or at least in Ethan’s experience, it is. _

_ So far he counts eight men down. Not including the guy laying outside in the dirt with a cracked head. Which means there’s six more somewhere inside. If he assumes two are tasked with guarding their prisoner no matter what, that leaves four who’ve figured out his game and wised up. He’ll need to be careful.  _

_ A bullet whizzes out of nowhere, burying itself in the wall above his head. Ethan ducks instinctively, dodging around a corner. Someone went outside, through a second exit, and is shooting in through the windows. Now they’re trying to bottleneck him, to force him out of hiding and into their line of fire.  _

_ But most people assume someone will be moving at a normal height level, and their aim is adjusted accordingly. Ethan crouches, crab-scuttling along the walls, and takes out two more men who weren’t prepared to aim half as high as they thought they should.  _

_ If his count is right, he still has the gunman outside, one more somewhere here, and then the two guards at the door. He really hopes his informant was legit and not sending him to his death.  _

_ It takes a little more work to find the last guy, but a shadow on a wall around a corner gives his position away. The window sniper gets in a lucky shoulder shot before Ethan’s bullet finds a home in his chest, but it’s nothing he can’t walk off. He finds the stairs to the basement level and descends slowly. Chances are, the door guards are waiting to ambush him.  _

_ The lights are all off, even flicking the switch he finds on the stairs does no good.  _ And they probably have night vision. _ Which actually works in his favor. _

_ He pulls the flashbang off his belt and tosses it down the black hallway. When it goes off, he shoots in the direction of the startled, pained cries. He doesn’t get both kill shots, he can still hear some groaning and gasping. But it doesn’t really matter, because there’s no bullets flying his way. He finishes the job and grabs a set of keys off the bigger guy’s belt, using the light on his gun to fit them into the lock on the door at the end of the hall. _

_ Finally, one works, and the door swings open. This room is lit, and inside, Ethan can see a small woman tied to a chair. Right beside her is a bearded man holding a gun to her head.  _ Guess no one thought it was important to tell me that the head of this terror cell flew in to personally interrogate their prisoner.

_ “Move, and she dies.” The gun is pressed to the woman’s temple, but she isn’t shaking. In fact, Ethan watches as she leans slightly forward, then throws herself to the side, the rope holding her upper body to the chair suddenly frayed and loose.  _

_ Ethan takes the opportunity and fires. The woman’s captor crashes to the floor with a bullet in his skull, and Ethan rushes over to the chair.  _

_ He carefully unties the blindfold. “Matty Webber?” _

_ She smiles, despite the blood on her lip and the bruise around her eye.  _

_ “Looks like you were doing just fine without me.” Every single one of the ropes is frayed.  _

_ “Well, I do appreciate you taking out the guards for me.” She stands up slowly, then stumbles and nearly falls. Ethan can only guess how stiff and sore and tired she must be. _

_ “Want a hand?” He bends down and puts an arm under her shoulder, the way he’d support any other operative who’d been injured. “Let’s get you home.”  _

_ The second they push open the door at the top of the stairs, Ethan grins. KC and the Sunshine Band is still going strong.  _ Guess our guy who went outside couldn’t find my radio. 

_ “Disco? Really?” Webber asks, and Ethan grins.  _

* * *

MAC AND JACK’S HOUSE

PRESENT DAY

“Hey Mac, did you notice anything different this morning?” Jack asks, looking up from the pan of bacon he’s turning a perfect crispy brown.

“Not really...wait, did you put up a tree without me?” Mac glances behind him.

“No way, dude. I would never deprive you of the wonderful tradition of trying to make sure the tree stays upright in its stand.” Jack shakes his head. Last year there was a very elaborate network of shoelaces and yarn holding the tree in position, thanks to Mac. “Or of forcing you to listen to me sing along with the radio while I work.”

“Okay, if it’s not a tree, or Christmas decorations, what?”

“I’m not coughing anymore.”

“Oh. Right. You’re not. That’s great!” 

Jack grins. Fighting the flu Mac brought home sucked, but he finally feels like he’s on the mend, and a good thing too, because it’s too close to the holiday season to be laid up. Too many traditions need to be upheld, he can’t be lying around on a couch with kleenex and a mug of whatever disgusting tea Riley insisted works for her. “Yeah, and I’m ready to go tree hunting with you today, too.” 

Mac grins. “Sounds like a plan to me.” Jack nods, he’s ready to get the house more festive than a few poinsettias courtesy of Jill (she gets them for the R&D desks every year) and the strings of lights that literally never come down all year, have made it. Although there is the card banner. 

There’s a whole line of Christmas cards strung up from the tops of the cupboards. A nativity painting graces the front of the one from Maria and Annabelle Pena, the Lawsons’ has a snowflake on the front that Jack guesses Valerie painted herself, the one from Mr. Ericson is spread open to the long, kind note inside, and Carlos’s is made of recycled paper and string; Jack wonders if his wife and daughter worked on it together.

One section of the ribbon they’re paper-clipped to is for these cards, Mac’s ‘family’. The other side is Jack’s. He grins at the sight of the ones from the Deltas, the photo of Worthy and his family displayed prominently. Momma sent one like she always does, and so did Charlie. 

There are a few directly in the middle. From Cage’s sister, with updated information about the baby that’s due in a few months, from Bozer’s sister, from Penny Parker (hers is a cheerful collage of photos with far too many candy cane and snowman embellishments, Jack swears he can feel her energy coming off the paper), and one from Frankie with a science pun Mac had to explain, and one from Sarah and her husband with a goofy cross-eyed polar bear on the front that is  _ such _ a Sarah choice Jack laughed when he opened the envelope. There’s even one with no return address and a postmark indicating it was sent from Jordan, and despite the generic card, Jack knows it was Desi checking in, the way she always has.  _ Long term undercovers are where she shines; but still, everyone needs contact with the familiar once in a while before they lose themselves. _ He knows an identical card was sent to a little noodle shop somewhere in Detroit. 

It’s always amazing, every year, to see how many people their lives have touched. Jack’s seen Mac, when he thinks Jack’s not looking, running his fingers over the cards. 

“Get the keys, we’re taking your Jeep,” Jack says. “It has the roof rack.”

Jack insists on Mac passing all the local pre-cut tree lots. It’s late in the season and anything left there will be scraggly. One of his old army buddies, a guy who lost a leg to an IED, owns a farm outside the city, and he’s promised to save a nice tree for Jack this year; he called ahead a few months ago to arrange it all, even though he’s surprising his kids with it. He called Riley and told her to show up too.

“Where are we going?” Mac asks.

“To get a tree the old-fashioned way,” Jack responds. 

“Seriously?” Mac asks. “You want to drive hours to pick your own tree and have someone cut it, just to say we did? You know I don’t care what our tree looks like, we could get a Charlie Brown one and it would vanish under all the ornaments your mom finally managed to send with you.” Jack grins.  _ She said that now that I have a whole house there is no excuse for leaving my things at hers. _ He left the tin with the really special ones that belong hanging in his old home, but the rest are all here. As are the ones Riley’s made for him over the years. 

“Kid, you are missing the point. The point is, this is what families do. And I intend to make some memories with my family.”

When they pull into the lot, Riley’s there waiting. “Okay, Jack, what is all this about? Why did you tell me to come out here into the woods somewhere? I kind of feel like this is the start of a horror movie.”

“Oh, it definitely is,” Jack says, grinning as a four-wheeler rumbles up, Marty riding it with a chainsaw strapped to the back cargo rack. “Because these pine trees are about to be the victims of Jack Dalton’s own personal Texas Chainsaw moment.” 

“Wait, they’re letting you cut the tree?” Mac asks.

“Perks of knowing the owner,” Jack grins as Marty slides off the vehicle and hands over the saw.

“Well, I’m with the kid. I’m not so sure this is a good idea,” Marty says. “Take it from me, you really want to keep your legs intact. It makes life easier.” He grins. “Sometimes I tell the high school boys or the soccer dads who want to be all macho and cut the tree themselves that this baby is from a rogue chainsaw.” He pats his prosthetic. “They shut up real fast.” 

“Don’t worry. I can handle an AR, I think I can manage a chainsaw.” Jack says. “I’m just kidding, though. I used to cut brush and slice old telephone poles into fence posts back on the ranch. I got this.” 

A little more than half an hour later, the three of them are sweaty, sticky, and covered with tiny wounds, wrestling the pine Jack cut onto the top of Mac’s jeep. 

“Hold it, Ri, or it’s gonna go right off the other side,” Jack says, straining to get the tie down over it. 

“What do you think I’m doing?” Riley asks. “Mac, how ‘bout a little physics support here? Is there a better way to do this?”

“Well, theoretically, but theoretical pine trees have much more stable branches. And less pitch everywhere.” Mac grimaces. “I think it’s in my hair.”

“Oh, stop complaining, this is fun,” Jack says, even as he curses out the tow strap that pinched his thumb under his breath.

“For you. You don’t have enough hair for pine needles or sap to get into,” Riley says. “I’m not sure this is ever going to come out.”

“Okay, got it,” Jack says. “Now let’s just pray it doesn’t come off and shish-kabob some unsuspecting tailgater’s car.” 

“Very funny,” Mac says. 

It’s only once they’re all inside and Jack has pulled off his sap-clogged gloves that he realizes his phone is buzzing. He pulls it out, frowning when a handful of needles come out of his pocket with it, and his finger leaves sappy streaks on the screen. It’s Matty.

“Yeah, boss?”

“Jack, I need you and Mac and Riley to come in. Now.”

_ Well, better hope we really tied that tree on well. _

* * *

Matty can’t stop replaying the video, even though she knows she shouldn’t. Knows that no matter how many times she watches it, it won’t change the outcome, won’t change the name that feels like it burns every time it’s spoken. 

She’s just let the looped playback repeat for the thirty-seventh time when Jack, Mac, and Riley walk in, followed by Leanna and Bozer, who were instructed to wait in the hall until the rest of the team arrived. 

Jack begins to talk, but Matty glares at him, and he stops, looking up at the video playing on the screen. Riley has a quizzical look, and the others are just watching emotionlessly. They think this is any other mission. Any other job. But to Matty, it’s not. And they’re all about to find out. 

“Tell the American CIA that I know all about Ethan Reigns. And I will start talking in 48 hours unless they walk me out the front door.”

“Are we supposed to know who Ethan Reign…” Riley begins, even as a dawning horror and comprehension flash across Jack’s face. 

Matty squares her shoulders. “Ethan Reigns is my husband.”

Bozer’s eyes fly wide open. “Matty, d-did you just say your husband?”

She’ll give them the condensed version and spare the details. “Ethan and I worked together at the CIA until ten years ago when he accepted an undercover assignment and was inserted into the largest criminal syndicate in the Balkan region, S-Company, a group that profits from drug trafficking, kidnapping and politically motivated bombings and assasinations.” Matty sighs. “Ethan's assignment was code-named Dragonfly.”

“Dragonfly? That's the name of the file you sent us into Ghana to recover,” Riley says. 

Matty nods. “Ethan was only supposed to be under for a year, but as he rose up the S-Company ranks, he kept passing back increasingly valuable intel to the CIA, so they kept extending his assignment. Samir is threatening to expose Ethan as a spy if the CIA doesn't comply with his demands. They sent me this video a few hours ago.”

Mac frowns. “Wouldn't take long for a rumor like that to get from the prison population back to S-Company. Guys on the inside have plenty of ways of passing information along, they’re not nearly as isolated as people would think.” Matty bites her lip. It’s always a cold shudder when Mac reminds them of his time behind bars. When they know all the unspoken things below the surface. 

“At which point, they would…” Riley starts.

“Kill him.” Matty lets the blunt words hang in the air, this isn’t the time to cloak danger with fancy words.

Leanna frowns. “If the CIA sent you this video, that means they saw it before you did. They’re not going to mobilize?”

Matty shakes her head. “He’s provided no actionable intel for years. They don’t consider him a valuable enough asset to risk an international incident on.” 

“They won’t even warn him?” Bozer asks. “Just send Ethan a signal warning him that his cover had been compromised?” 

“Warning Ethan is not a possibility,” Matty replies.

“Why not?” Leanna asks. 

“Because two years after he went undercover, Ethan’s handler died in what was quite clearly an S-Company hit, and Ethan stopped contacting the CIA at all. It was presumed that he flipped sides. Only a few people knew that he cut ties in order to maintain his cover due to complications, and that his handler’s death was probably coincidental; we know Ethan was being watched, and someone must have seen them together and taken action. There’s no telling how far he’s gone to maintain his cover, or if he’s even still acting on behalf of the CIA at all. We can’t even be completely sure he’s still alive.” She swallows. “But whether he is or not, Samir’s information means he won’t be for long.” 

Mac’s eyes are wide with emotion. “Matty, I'm so sorry.”

Matty knows if she responds to him she’ll lose it. So she stays mission focused. She has to. “My friend at the Agency passed me the footage because Uncle Sam is currently negotiating a new trade agreement with the Croatian government.”

“What does that have to do with…” Bozer begins. 

“Well, the U. S. government isn't gonna waste the political capital to transfer Samir to another prison. Not when they have bigger fish to fry,” Jack replies. 

“And I can't say I blame them,” Matty says. “Despite the fact that thanks to your recovery of Dragonfly, we have proof Ethan’s not a traitor, most of the CIA blacklisted him a long time ago. And since he went dark, he’s given them nothing. Even if he’s not a traitor, he’s gone rogue and is no longer a useful asset.” 

“So no one's going to help Ethan,” Riley says. 

“No one but us.” Matty looks up at all of them. “I have no authority to ask you to act on behalf of an agent the CIA has all but disavowed. But I’m going to anyway.”

“Matty, we got your back. You’ve helped us dozens of times,” Bozer says. “Least we can do is pay that back a little.” 

Riley nods. “We’re going to bring your husband home, Matty.”

“Good.” Matty feels her heart unweight itself, just a little. “Now. You need us to break into that prison, grab Samir, break back out before he has a chance to tell anyone else what he knows. My husband's life depends on it.”

* * *

Riley knows she should be working on trying to trace Samir’s activity, and whether he’s made contact with anyone, but she can’t help getting a little distracted listening to Jack’s story about Matty’s secret marriage. 

_ How could none of us have known? _ She wonders if Cage knew. Or if she suspected. But Riley knows Sam would never have let on if she did find out the truth.  _ It never affected our missions before, it was never need-to-know.  _ But still, she wishes Matty had said something. Anything. 

“Now, they first met when Ethan saved Matty on an op that went belly-up. You know, he and I only crossed paths a couple of times at the CIA. He had a reputation for being an exceptional agent with a certain pizzazz for getting under the ASAC's skin, which is something I kind of liked about him, to be honest with you.” Jack chuckles. “He left shortly after I started, so I guess I took that job over for him.” He shrugs. “But it didn’t take me too long to figure out that, uh, those two were an item. Even though they never let on. That's not really condoned behavior at the Agency.” He shrugs. “But whenever I saw them pass in the hallway, you could tell. She finally broke down and admitted the truth to me a few months after he went undercover. Guess she figured I’d be a good listening ear. I never knew the details of his op, but, you know, I knew enough not to ask. You know what I mean?” He sighs. “And then it all went to hell, and they were accusing him of killing his handler and flipping. And...she never talked about him again except as a mission.” 

“He must have gone dark right before I was recruited,” Riley says. “That explains a lot, honestly. Matty seemed so...preoccupied. I didn’t know her at all, then, so it didn’t really seem out of character, but now...those first months always felt off to me, later. Like that was a Matty she didn’t like people to see. She was vulnerable in a way I haven’t seen very often since.”

Jack nods, sitting down beside Mac, who’s making something that vaguely resembles a snowflake out of a paperclip.

“Can't believe this,” Bozer says.

“What, that Matty was secretly married?” Leanna asks. “I can. That must have been why she went soft on us when she found out we were dating. She’d already been there herself.” Riley nods. It does make sense now. She was surprised when she found out Matty okayed Bozer and Leanna’s relationship; it hadn’t seemed very much like the Matty she knew. But she didn’t know the agent trying to keep her love life hidden. She never got the chance to.

Bozer shakes his head, smiling. “No. That Jack was able to keep a secret for that long.”

Jack pokes him, and Bozer rolls his eyes and holds up his hands in mock surrender. 

Mac looks up from his paperclip bending. “I'm still trying to wrap my head around the fact that if this Samir guy never got arrested, we never would've found out.”

“I know. I feel like, all of a sudden, Matty's a totally different person,” Bozer says. 

Jack shakes his head. “Nah. Same person, Boze. You're just getting to peek behind the curtain, that's all.”

“Wait. You got a secret wife somewhere you never told us about?” Bozer asks. “I mean, if Matty can have a hidden personal life, so could you.”

“Nope. What you see is what you get, with ol’ Jack Dalton.” Jack shakes his head. “You think if I had a family I’d be able to resist makin’ sure y’all met?”

“Well, since you took me to your family’s Christmas party the first year I was on the team, I’m gonna say no,” Mac says with a grin. “When you have someone you even remotely consider family, you make sure the whole world knows it.”

“That’s damn right, kiddo.” Riley nods. There’s no way Jack would be able to stand having members of his family who hadn’t met. Granted, Mac’s never met Desi, but as far as Riley knows the woman’s been deep cover for the past four years.  _ I only met her once, but it only took once to feel like she was Jack’s sister. _

She gets up and walks over to a window seat, hoping to focus on her hacking. She has to get inside the prison phone system, scan for outgoing calls, and then try to match any to Samir’s voice ripped from the CIA tape. It’s going to be a process.

When Bozer joins her, she rolls her eyes, but lets him sit down. She’s cycling passwords right now, it’s not like she’s in the middle of something intense. And there  _ is _ something she wants to say without Mac and Jack overhearing.

“So, Matty and a secret husband. Weird, right?” Bozer asks. 

“There’s something she’s not telling us. About Ethan.” 

“Yeah, well, I don’t think I want to know all the private details of their marriage, you know what I mean? Or wait, you think they’ve got a  _ kid _ somewhere and we haven’t heard?” Bozer’s eyes go wide. 

Riley shakes her head. “It...I think it has something to do with Mac.”

“Mac? How? Ethan went undercover before...before Mac even became a vigilante,” Bozer says. “There’s no way they could ever have met. Right?”

“I don’t know. But she keeps watching Mac, and she looks...guilty.” RIley shakes her head. “I’m not imagining things. I’m sure of it Bozer. She looked the same way during the Dragonfly op. Like she wanted to apologize and couldn’t.”

“Apologize for what?” Riley wishes she had an answer. “Riley, everything about this op is weird, are you sure it’s not just something else?” He frowns. “We’re basically chasing a dead man. We don’t even really know if Ethan’s still alive for S-Company  _ to  _ kill,” Bozer says. “I mean, no one has heard from him for a while, right? And if they killed his handler, they might have killed him too.”

“Well, we’re unable to hack S-Company’s communications, so we have no way of knowing for sure whether his cover alias is still active or not. And since they’re good enough not to get caught, on cameras or any other traceable media…”

“Ethan’s as good as a ghost no matter what.”

“Exactly. If I had access to their encrypted networks I could find out for sure whether his alias is still with S-Company, but they have security even I can’t bypass. I worked on it for a month when I was first...when I was first recruited.” Riley stops. There’s suddenly a new piece tossed into the puzzle of her recruitment, and she doesn’t like the picture it’s just shown her exists. 

_ Matty pulled me out of prison, got me a job at the CIA, and immediately handed me the job of cracking S-Company’s encrypted communication network.  _ And up until a few hours ago, Riley had believed that had just been because Matty saw her talent, and wanted to give her a real challenge. But now that she knows S-Company was personal, and that she was suddenly Matty’s pet project when her hacking prowess landed her on a government radar…

_ She wanted me because she wanted someone who could get into that network and find Ethan. I just happened to be the best she could get.  _ And Riley has the sinking feeling that if there had been someone better, she’d have ended up like Mac, doing time in a supermax.  _ It was never about my potential, about how young I was, how I just needed a second chance instead of a sentence. It was always about what she needed from me. _ Except that Riley had never succeeded. S-Company’s network is still as secure as ever. 

She stands up quickly, a hot anger burning in her stomach.  _ She could have just told me that that’s what she wanted. I would have understood. _ But instead, Matty coerced her, lied to her, manipulated her. 

She almost backs down when she walks up to Matty’s seat and sees the look on the woman’s face.  _ This isn’t the time for this. Matty’s hurting, and scared, I can’t pile this on. _ But then Matty looks up. 

“Yes, Riley, do you have something?”

“Right. Because that’s all I’ve ever been good for,” Riley snaps, and all the bitterness and anger breaks the fragile wall she was forcing up. “It’s always been ‘Riley, can you do this?’ ‘Riley, are you inside?’ ‘Riley, how’s that hack coming?’”

Matty frowns. “What’s wrong?”

“What’s wrong is that you lied to me.” Riley blurts out.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about Ethan. But it wouldn’t have been safe. And by the time you were with us, he’d already turned. I didn’t want…”

“I don’t care about that. But I know full well that he turned before you recruited me, Matty. Because that’s  _ why  _ you recruited me. And don’t sit there and lie to my face and tell me it wasn’t.” She’s trying to keep her voice a low hiss, so she doesn’t disturb the others, but she can feel Mac and Jack’s eyes on her.

“Riley…” Matty begins. But Riley isn’t going to let her talk, isn’t going to give her the chance to spin this, to twist the words like she can. Like she did all those years ago.

“Matty, you chose me…” Riley whispers. “You asked the CIA to recruit me because you knew I was a good hacker, that I cracked US government systems. You wanted me to get inside S-Company’s communications.” 

Matty just nods.

“Was everything you told me, about my potential, about what you saw in me...was that just a bunch of B.S. to make me want to cooperate?” Riley shakes her head. “You said you understood me, that you wanted to give me a chance. But now, it looks like what you really wanted was what I could do.”  _ I always saw Matty differently than most people. I didn’t understand how she gained a reputation for being heartless and cold, when she was so kind to me, when she pulled strings to help someone she didn’t even know, out of the goodness of her heart. But she never did. She was exactly what everyone knew she was, and she had me fooled. _

Matty sighs. “Riley, I’m sorry. And I’m sorry you found out like this.”

“So it is true. You pulled me out of prison to help you get into S-Company and find Ethan. Because you wanted answers, you wanted him to pay for turning on the CIA, and you thought I could help you do it.” 

Matty sits up a little straighter. Her eyes are shining with tears. “There’s no point in lying to you, Riley. It’s all true. I went after Ethan with everything I had, once we believed he turned. So when a friend in the CIA handed me your file, as a favor, I thought it was the best chance I had. So I tracked you down.”

Riley takes a shuddering breath. She remembers it all in vivid detail. And Matty’s eyes had seemed so honest then. Even though Riley hadn’t really believed her. Had only agreed to get a peek behind the curtain she’d been clawing at all her life.  _ She convinced me to stop fighting. But why? _ “So, when I couldn’t deliver, why didn’t you kick me to the curb?”

“Riley, it was wrong of me to  _ ever  _ see you as just a means to an end all those years ago. But I assure you, from the moment I met you in that holding room, you weren’t just a file, you weren’t just a hacker who could find Ethan for me. You were someone I cared for.” 

Riley thinks she believes that. But she also believed Matty then.  _ What is true anymore? _ She wishes she knew. 

* * *

“Hey, Matty.” It’s Mac’s voice. 

Matty doesn’t look up. “Blondie.” She doesn’t want to talk to anyone right now, not really. She needs time to think. Everything about this day is going horribly wrong, and she’s afraid that at some point she’ll open her mouth, and instead of words, she’ll only manage a sob or a scream.  _ How did everything fall apart so quickly? _ Her perfectly structured, orderly little world is crashing to pieces. But if anyone can understand that feeling, it’s Mac.

He sits down across from her, gingerly, like he’s afraid to settle in at all, like he expects her to make him leave. His voice is hesitant when he does start to speak. 

“I've been replaying all the conversations that we've had over the last year, while I was searching for my dad, and all the times that you've been there for me. And then I realized that you've been living the same nightmare with your husband, and I had no idea.”

“It's okay, Mac. You didn't know because I didn't tell you.”

“How did you do your job every day, like everything was fine?” 

“Same way you did. I didn’t have a choice.” 

“I just...how did you live with the thought that he was out there, a traitor and a killer?” Mac whispers. 

_ He wants to know how to live with what James has done. How to move on. _ Matty sighs. “I searched for him. I did everything in my power to bring him in, but I never could. And I realized that obsessing about him was affecting other missions, risking other lives that I knew I could save. And I reminded myself his deeds were on his own head. That nothing he did was my fault, or my responsibility.” 

_ And it definitely helped that we proved he was no traitor. _ She’s felt a huge weight off her shoulders the past few weeks.  _ Because for all I told myself, I kept thinking, and wondering, if in any way I’d contributed to the monster I thought he became.  _ And sadly, Mac will never get that kind of closure. His father is exactly what everyone believed he was. “And Mac, if this is about James, the same is true. What he’s done is not and never was your fault.”  _ And not seeing that from the start almost pushed me to a horrible mistake. _

“Thank you. But I also wanted to tell you, I wanted you to know that I am going to do everything that I can to make sure that you get the answers you deserve. Just like you did for me.”

Matty’s heart twists.  _ Oh Mac. You’re willing to move heaven and earth for me, and you don’t know the truth. About Ethan, and me, and about how it almost ruined everything you built for yourself with Phoenix.  _

She wants to tell him. But there’s no sense in digging up the past right now. And if she’s being honest, she wants it to stay buried until they have Ethan back stateside. Matty can’t afford two agents distracted or angry. She needs Mac focused. Not digging around in his memories of the past. Not after Riley.  _ I didn’t think she’d react like that. But she deserved the truth and I never gave it to her; she had every right to do what she did. _ As will Mac when she tells him. It would serve her right if both of them quit.  _ I’ll have to earn their trust back all over again.  _ The thought stings, but she knows it’s her own fault for 

_ I don’t think Mac or Riley would ever let personal feelings get in the way of an op. _ She can’t possibly believe that either of them could be be angry enough to let Ethan die for it. But she also knows that every distraction, every conflict of interest, makes them more volatile in the field, more likely to make a mistake. 

_ When it’s over, I’ll tell him. Everything. _

* * *

CROATIAN PRISON

MAC IS ABOUT TO BE ON THE WRONG SIDE OF THAT WALL

Mac takes a deep breath.

_ It’s fine. Everything’s fine. You just have to fly over a wall on a tiny little drone, break into a prison, break  _ out  _ a criminal by faking his death, and do it all without getting caught and getting yourself tossed in a cell. Easy. _

Jack offered to go in for him, but they couldn’t be sure the drone would handle his weight. Jack complained about the basis for the decision endlessly. 

_ “It’s all muscle!” _

_ “Which still adds weight. Dalton, you’re fit for your height, no one is disputing that right now. But Mac is shorter and skinny to boot. Bozer would attract too much attention, and Riley and Leanna can’t go undercover as guards in a men’s prison.”  _

Mac has to admit Matty’s logic is sound, and they can’t risk Jack getting injured. Mac  _ is _ smaller and lighter,  _ too much lighter, _ according to Jack.

_ “See, dude, this is why you have to eat more. Then we wouldn’t have this problem.”  _

_ “Yes we would. Because then the drone wouldn’t lift either of us.” _

_ “Keep pushing it, kid. Keep pushing, and see what happens.” _

Mac blinks away the memories and focuses on the mission at hand. 

“Bozer and I are in position.”

Riley acknowledges over comms. “I'm behind the prison's firewall. Now I just need to give myself super-user access, and we can really have some fun.”

“Good work, Riles,” Jack says. “You keep them away from Mac, okay?”

“I’ll do my best.” Riley says. It’s not incredibly reassuring, but Mac knows that’s all the promise he’s going to get.

At least this time he’s not going in as an inmate, not like Bishop. Under the black jumpsuit that will hopefully make him less visible against the night sky, he’s wearing one of the khaki guard uniforms. But a prison is a prison, and he wishes there was another way.

He grits his teeth and swallows hard as he reaches up to grab the hovering drone and it begins to lift him off the ground. The mechanism tilts and sways, trying to adjust to his weight, which must not be perfectly centered.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa!” He shifts his hands just slightly, like moving the slides on a balance scale to calibrate it.  _ Just like in class. Think about that, not about losing your grip and falling. Not about that. _

“Mac, are you okay?” It’s a chorus of voices. 

“Oh, yeah, yeah, but that's that's high enough, Boze.” Mac can feel his chest constricting with fear, and with the uncomfortable overhead position of his arms. He can’t breathe, and if he can’t breathe he’ll lose his grip and fall. 

“What's worse,” Bozer asks, “your fear of heights, or running into all that razor wire?”

“D-do I have to choose?” Mac can tell Bozer is trying to be Jack right now, to soothe the tension with humor. But it isn’t really helping at the moment. The ground is spinning below him, and Mac is afraid he might throw up. “Just set me down nice, nice and easy.”

Unfortunately, coming down isn’t exactly easy. Mac’s halfway to the ground before a guard walks past underneath, and the resulting rapid rise unbalances the drone for good. It begins descending at an awkward angle, and far too fast.

Mac can’t yelp, so he settles for panicked whispering instead. “No, no. No. No. No, no. No, no.”

“Hey kiddo, hang in there, it’s okay,” Jack says. “We’ve almost got you on the ground.” 

Then the drone pitches wildly, and Mac loses his grip, pulling the drone down with him, as he falls the last few feet to the ground. He tries to tuck and roll as he lands, and at least nothing snaps, but he can already feel the bruises forming, and his left wrist twinges it protest at the way it was trapped under his body.  _ I’m gonna feel that in the morning. _

“All right, guys, I think we might want to recalibrate the pitch on that thing,” He says breathlessly, as he pulls off the black coverall and tosses it aside with a shudder.

“Yeah, sorry about that,” Bozer says. “Better get busy walking it off, though. You got a guard coming your way, and unless you’ve suddenly mastered Croatian, I don’t think you want to meet him.” 

“Okay.” Mac starts toward the door Riley pointed out on the schematics earlier. “Riley, are you inside yet?” 

“Sure thing, Mac. Open Sesame.” There’s a soft beep and click, and Mac pulls the door open and steps inside. He’s immediately hit by the stench of sweat, stale air, and fear, and he shudders as he glances down a long hall of cells. He needs to do this and do this fast. Before they catch him in here and he ends up on the wrong side of the bars. 

“How do I find Samir, Riley?”

“He's in cell block D, cell 14. All right, Mac, I'm about ready to wipe these records. Once you confirm you've found Samir, I'll make it like he was never even here.”

It feels strange and a little wrong to walk down the hall as a guard rather than as a prisoner. He follows Riley’s directions in his ear until he reaches the cell where their mark is being kept. He glances inside, and breathes a sigh of relief when he recognizes the face from the video, at least the prison records were accurate. “I can confirm, Samir is in the cell. I’m going to get him.” 

He taps on the cell door. 

“Samir?” The man stands up, glancing at Mac with a skeptical frown. “We got your message. I'm here to get you out.”

“You are from the CIA?”

Mac doesn’t answer that. Instead, he pulls a small bag out of his pocket and removes a pill. “Listen to me very carefully. I need you to swallow this.”

“What is it?” Samir asks, hesitantly.

Mac starts to rattle off the chemical formula, then realizes that’s probably not what Samir meant. “The key to unlocking this door.”

“Yeah, or it kills me before I can tell anyone what I know. I think I’ll pass.” 

“Look, you asked for help, and here we are. You think arranging this was easy?” Mac asks. “That pill is the only way to get out of this cell, and time is a serious factor. Now swallow it.” Samir still hesitates, shaking his head. Mac’s getting worried, stressed, and running out of time. He’s done. “Samir, if we wanted you dead, you'd be dead already. I work for someone who has questions. Questions only you can answer. But if you want to get out of this prison, you're gonna have to trust me.”

He’s just passed the pill through the bars when the door at the end of the hall opens. 

Someone shouts, and Mac doesn’t understand it, but he runs. He’s been made, he can’t afford to try and bluff his way out of this.

“Take the pill. Swallow it,” He calls, just as the alarms begin screaming overhead.

Mac shivers. The clang of doors, the wail of alarms, the shouts from the cells...He blinks, shaking his head. He can’t afford to have a panic attack right now. 

“Mac, what’s that sound?” Jack asks.

“Samir took the pill, but I've been made. Things are about to get complicated.”

“They already did,” Riley says. “I’m into their radio chatter. The guards think Prisoner 1138 was poisoned by someone posing as one of them. They’re looking for you right now.” 

Mac ducks into a corner, knowing it won’t be long before this place is no longer a good spot to hide. He’s well aware of how prison lockdown procedures work. He’s lived through more than one riot. 

The guard patterns here may not be exactly the same as CCI, but he knows the general rules of a lockdown. And he knows he was too far inside the building to be able to get to an exterior door before they’re closed. As a matter of fact, he probably won’t make it off this cell block without getting caught.

“Mac, what's your status?” Riley asks.

“Not great. I’ve got a lot of locked doors between me and freedom right now,” Mac whispers. “Don’t suppose that drone’s capable of giving me an airlift from the roof?”

“Nope, sorry Mac,” Bozer says. “It got damaged when it came down. I was able to limp it out of there, but the calibration is whacked and it would never hold your weight.” 

“Then I’ll just have to find another way out of here. And no pressure, guys, but if we don't get Samir the injection in ten minutes, thirty-two seconds, he really is gonna end up dead.”

“Mac, I’m going to cut power to the prison now. It’ll black the place out completely before the emergency power kicks in, but hopefully it’ll let me get you out of there.” Riley’s voice is tense and stressed. “I’m trying to override the lockdown procedures, but the electronic locks are hardwired to engage for a full hour once triggered. But I think if I shut the electric off I can force the system to reboot, and give me a chance to override them.”

“Okay, do it.”

The whole building is suddenly plunged into a pitch blackness. Mac feels his breath catch in his throat. He huddles against the wall, feeling the darkness closing in. Like the bars and locks are creeping up on him, about to swallow him. 

He focuses on taking slow breaths, in and out, in and out. On not panicking. And then the emergency power kicks in, flooding the space with a dull reddish glow. And showing Mac, in all too vivid view, the real guard standing only a few feet away.

Mac tries to give him a small nod and move on, but the man clearly isn’t buying it. He says something to Mac in Croatian, and when Mac doesn’t respond, the man moves in. Mac tries to push him away, but the guy’s a lot bigger, a lot stronger, and he has the advantage of having surprised Mac and startled him.

The man pins Mac to the wall, an arm across his throat. Mac can’t understand a thing he’s saying, but he knows it’s not good. He can’t move, he can’t breathe…

It’s too much. The lights, the sirens, the whole thing, it’s too familiar. A surge of disjointed, half-formed memories is pouring through his brain, memories of being shoved against walls and bars and shower tile, of hands…

_ No. No, this isn’t going to happen. Not today. _ Mac slams his head forward, catching the guard in the nose, the way he knows Jack would. The momentary loss of grip is enough, and Mac throws himself free and runs for the stairs. 

“Mac, are you okay?” Jack shouts.

“Yeah.” Mac leans against the side of the stairwell, catching his breath. The simple fact that he didn’t freeze up is turning over and over in his head. _ I always freeze.  _ But that was when giving up was the safest, most painless option. The only way to survive. Now, that’s not true anymore.

He takes a last deep breath and pushes open the door, Riley must have gotten into the system the way she had hoped. “I’m coming to you.”

Riley’s voice comes over the line, worried. “Uh, guys, we may have another problem. Samir made a phone call five hours ago.”

“Who did he call?” Matty asks. 

“I don't know.”

“Maybe he got lonely and called his mom. Even dirtbags have mommies,” Jack suggests, but Mac can tell from his tone of voice that this is his laugh-in-the-face-of-really-bad-news kind of comment. 

“Maybe isn't good enough. If Samir called someone in S-Company, Ethan's as good as dead,” Matty replies. “Riley, get me a name.” Her voice softens rapidly. “Please.” Mac can tell she’s walking on eggshells around Riley right now, after what happened on the plane. But none of them have time to deal with the fallout of that right now.

Riley cuts in again. “Prison medics just reached out to the local hospital. Jack, Bozer, Leanna, that's your cue.”

Mac hears the whoop of ambualnce sirens as he shoves open another door. There’s still chatter in his comms, and he’s halfway paying attention as he opens doors, dodges guards, and makes his way toward the sound. 

“Leanna, you got less than one minute before we lose Samir for good,” Matty says. 

There’s a gurgling groan, and then a deep breath.

“Done,” Leanna says.

“All right, package is in hand. Where are you, Mac?” Jack asks.

“I’m outside. About ten feet to your left,” Mac says. He takes a grateful inhale of the fresh air.

“Okay, Boze, when you pull out, back up to that door. Give the kid some cover,” Jack says. “Mac, we’re coming to ya.”

Mac crouches in the shadows, watching as the ambulance begins backing up toward his hiding place. When it’s close enough he dives underneath, grabbing onto the undercarriage.

“I’m on, Jack.”

“Let's get the hell out of Dodge.” Mac couldn’t be happier about that. He watches the prison lights and guard towers fade in the background, and he feels the tension that’s been there since the start of this breakout finally slip away. He’s safe, and free. 

* * *

Jack slaps Samir’s face, shoving the man into a slightly more upright position on one of the jet’s seats. “Mac, you sure you’ve got him secured?”

“Oh, he’s not going anywhere,” Mac says. 

Samir blinks awake blearily, eyes scanning the room. He glances at Jack, then at Mac. And then he stares at Mac, who’s still wearing the prison guard uniform, minus the weird little hat thing. Jack hasn’t asked why the kid hasn’t changed. He’d figured Mac would want to ditch the thing as soon as possible. But he’s just been sitting in his seat, shivering a little and working on the restraints that are now holding Samir’s hands and legs to the seat.

“That pill what did it do?” Samir asks, eyes frantically locked on Mac. “Are you even CIA?” 

“Riley, play that call,” Jack says.

Samir’s voice drifts out of her computer. “Yes, hello. This is Samir Verma. We know some of the same people.”

“What people?” 

“It doesn't matter. I'm calling to tell you, you have a CIA spy undercover in your organization. He's been with you for years. I will give you his name if you help me out of my current situation.” Riley presses stop, and the silence in the jet’s cabin is deafening.

Samir looks from Mac to Jack to Riley to Matty, and clearly realizes he’s out of luck at getting sympathy from any of them. He twists in his seat, shaking. “I only made that call because I didn't know you were coming. If someone had told me…”

“It wasn't enough you asked the CIA for help, was it? You had to play both sides,” Jack snaps.

“Can you really blame a guy for exploring all of his options? Besides, I didn't even give them the agent's name, so what's the problem?”

Matty steps forward, glaring. There’s a deadly anger in her eyes that Jack knows has never been turned on him before. For all that he and Matty have had their issues, he’s never seen this. “What's the problem? The problem is that now S-Company thinks they have a mole problem, which means, Samir, that you now have a "me" problem. Nobody knows we pulled you out of that prison, so no one will ask a single question if you just happen to topple out the back of this plane.”

Samir stares, eyes wide.

Jack nods. “Yeah, she's dead serious.”

Matty doesn’t break eye contact with Samir. “Now I'm gonna ask you some questions. And what happens to you next is based entirely on how helpful I feel your answers are, do you understand?” Samir nods. “Good. How did you learn that Ethan Reigns was an undercover CIA agent?”

“He recruited me to introduce him to a business associate of mine. This was years ago in Serbia. I realized then that Ethan was CIA. Did some digging, but stayed quiet. I figured, someday, I might be able to use the info.”

Riley looks up from her rig. “Ethan's old undercover reports mention a CI he cultivated in Serbia. No name, but this must be him.”

“Is Reigns still alive? When's the last time you saw him?” Jack knows Matty well enough to hear the emotion bleeding into her voice on those questions. 

“Face-to-face? A few years. But he's done well for himself in S-Company. Wasn't hard to keep track of.” Jack watches a shudder run down Matty’s spine. But she forges on.

“Where is Ethan Reigns right now?”

“Last I heard, Cyprus.”

“Leanna, give the pilot new coordinates,” Matty says. Leanna stands up and walks toward the front. “You're gonna need to be more specific.”

“That's all I know, I swear. I heard Ethan was sent to Cyprus to expand S-Company's territory. They're making some big moves there. If I knew more, I'd tell you. I would.”

“Okay. Since you’re of no further use...Jack, take care of him, will you?”

“My pleasure.” Jack slams a heavy fist into the guy’s face, and Samir slumps over. When Jack turns around, Matty is gone.

He finds her in the bathroom. The door is ajar, and she’s standing in front of the mirror, panting as if she’s trying to stop herself from hyperventilating or sobbing.

“Matty? Matty, hey, hey, hey, boss lady.” Jack kneels beside her. “Oh, hey, what's going on? Now, deep breaths. Deep breaths.” He rests his hands on her shoulders. He knows too much about bringing someone down from a panic attack, thanks to Mac. “Deep breaths now.”

Matty’s shaking finally slows, and she takes a few hitching breaths, turning to Jack. “The moment S-Company got that call, they would've started searching for the undercover agent. It's only a matter of time before they realize that Ethan crossed paths with Samir.”

“I know, but we're gonna get to Cyprus, and we're gonna find him before they connect those dots.” Jack pulls Matty into a hug, and surprisingly, she doesn’t resist. “I promise, okay? Hey. I promise. It's gonna be all right. You hear me?”

“Okay.” It’s wrong to hear Matty so afraid, so uncertain. 

“Okay. There you go. It'll be all right.”

* * *

CYPRUS

BEAUTIFUL COUNTRY...AND HOME OF SOME VERY BAD PEOPLE

Jack listens to the car pull into the driveway of the house, and crouches a little lower under the windowsill. When Samir woke up again, it seemed the knock to the head had jogged his memory, because he coughed up a name. Lutsky. Thanks to Riley’s work, a house deeded to a V. Lutsky turned up in the Cyprian databases, and that’s where they are now. Waiting for this S-Company goon to show.

The door opens, and Jack makes his move, standing up to press his gun to the man’s head. He sees Lutsky’s hand go for his own gun, but the next second Matty’s got his arm and pinned it behind his back, painfully tight. 

Jack shakes his head. “Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah. Nobody moves, or it's your last day breathing.” 

The man nods, groaning.

“Are you Lutsky?” Jack asks. 

“Who the hell are you?” The man snaps back. 

“Who the hell am I?” Jack asks, and he hears a grunt as Matty twists the man’s arm even further. He’s half afraid she’ll snap it. “I'm the guy who's asking the questions.”

Jack takes the man’s arm from Matty and drags him through the house, shoving him down in a chair in the kitchen where Mac ties him up with some zipties and the cords from a couple appliances. Jack glances at some papers on the table nearby. The layout of the blueprints is one he recognizes all too well.

“Oh, lookie there. That's not a terrible plan, but a few minor problems, though.” He taps a finger on the paper. “This corner? They built a guard tower so this guy would be seen coming a mile away.”

“Plus, we broke out Samir last night,” Leanna says. 

“You hear that? We beat you to it,” Bozer says. “That's how we found out Samir called you from prison.”

“Samir made a big mistake calling here,” Riley says, taking the man’s phone from his pocket and plugging it into her rig. “You know, we've always known that S-Company communicates on a custom-built cellular network, which is why it was always so impossible to run digital surveillance on you and your criminal pals. We never had a way in, until now.” Jack notices she doesn’t look at Matty.  _ That’s gonna be some time healing that rift. _ But he’s proud of his girl for squashing her emotions right now and getting the job done. 

Matty pulls a paper and pen out from a drawer. “You're gonna write down the names of everyone you spoke to after you hung up with Samir.” She shoves the pen into his hand.

“You will have to untie me,” Lutsky insists.

“No, we won’t. Figure it out,” Jack says. “Get to writing.”

He paces the kitchen while Lutsky works. Matty pulls various knives from a cutlery holder and carries them to the table with her, looking them over and commenting on them, and each time she stands up, Lutsky scribbles a little faster.

Mac’s going around the house grabbing a few things in case he needs them later. Cleaning supplies, matches, a few other odds and ends, are all nice to have on him just in case. And since this guy’s going away for a long time, he won’t be needing them. There’s a metallic crashing sound from upstairs, and Lutsky jumps, startled. Jack wonders what Mac found to tear apart for pieces.

Riley’s voice is stiff and stilted as she comes up to the table to give Matty the status update on her own work, Leanna and Bozer following her. “The data we mined from those devices cracked S-Company's cell network wide open. I'm looking at communications here dating back years.”

Leanna nods. “It’ll take time to untangle all this fresh intel, but it looks like a treasure trove.” She frowns at her screen. “Man, these guys are into some dark stuff.”

“What kind of dark stuff?” Jack asks, glancing upstairs to where he can hear Mac.  _ How far am I gonna want to keep him away from these people? _

“Abductions. Murders. Human trafficking. Looks like S-Company's willing to do anything to protect the expansion of their business into Cyprus.”

Riley’s computer chimes, and she turns it around on the table. “I just got 137 mentions of Ethan's undercover name in texts and e-mails, all pointing to one IMEI number.”

“Wait, you got Ethan's phone number?” Bozer asks.

“Yeah. But before you get too excited, as of yesterday, S-Company's been snooping on all their people's cell traffic.”

Jack nods. “They're looking for a mole. If we call Ethan on his cell phone, we'll out him.” 

“Yeah, but it's not all bad news. I can track his cell phone in real time. Judging by his speed, he's in a car.”

“Great work, Riles. I'll get the van. Mac, we’re pulling out, so grab whatever else you want and let’s split.” He pulls the van around, and everyone piles in, Matty riding shotgun. It’s not until they’re on the road that he asks about the look on her face. 

“You okay, Matty?” 

She shakes her head. “Since the day Ethan left, I've imagined what it would be like to see him again. And now that the moment's almost here, I don't know if I'll be able to get a word out. Jack, I lost faith. I let myself believe that he’d turned. How can I face him after that?” 

“He’ll just have to accept it,” Jack says. “Because it’s what happened. And you might have to learn to live with some of the things he’s done too.” Jack sighs. “Ten years undercover is no joke. You spend all that time looking over your shoulder. It can weigh on you.”

“Jack, I know. I’ve supervised plenty of long-term ops. I’ve seen good men go insane because of the things they’ve done to survive. I’ve seen guys who come home and put the gun to their heads, or guys who come home and put a gun to someone else. And the ones who fall so deep into that world they can’t pull themselves out, the ones who never come home. Surviving in S-Company this long means Ethan's seen things, done things, things that likely turned him into a very different man than the one I fell in love with.”

Mac nods. “But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t save him.”

Jack nods.  _ Ethan’s not the only one who’s done what he has to to survive and come out different.  _ Mac’s experience was two years instead of ten, but he did things no one should have to do, to stay alive.  _ He’s not the same as he would have been if he’d never been sent to prison. _ It hurts to think about, but no amount of grieving what never was can change the past. And Matty knows that too. 

“Let's save his life today. We'll figure out the rest tomorrow.”

* * *

THE OSA PENINSULA

2003

_ Matty shakes her head at the sound coming from the speakers.  _ Trust Ethan to request they play disco and keep it coming all night long.  _ He’d even had the CD on him, which makes her think he probably set this up in advance. It wouldn’t surprise her. _

_ As far as places to have an impromptu wedding reception go, this one is pretty nice, actually, with strings of soft lights, wicker chairs and tables, and a massive open patio covered in potted flowers in all shades of red, orange, yellow, and purple, which is where Ethan found them a place.  _

_ “All I'm saying is that there's other musical choices out there. And if we're gonna be sharing a life, you may want to consider expanding your musical horizons.” She twists the new silver band on her pinky finger. It’s not obvious, not a dead giveaway that things have changed, but it means the world to her. “That's all I'm saying.” _

_ Ethan raises an eyebrow. “Okay. All  _ I'm _ saying is that everything, whether it's rock or rap or house, it all comes back to disco anyway, so why not just stay there, at the source?”  _

_ “How did you get like this? You were, like, six when the '70s ended,” Matty chuckles. She feels strangely bubbly, like she wants to laugh or start singing along to this atrocious music. It’s a new feeling and she likes it.  _

_ “My parents listened to disco when I was growing up. It just reminds me of them,” Ethan says, leaning back in his chair. _

_ “I'm sorry they couldn't be here,” Matty says. Her own family is all but gone, those who are left, distant. But Ethan talked a lot about his family back home in Pittsburgh, about how close they all are, about holidays and family traditions and inside jokes.  _

_ “It's okay. I don't need a big, fancy wedding with a bunch of guests fawning all over us. I just need you. And Padre What's-his-name. What is his name?”  _

_ The giggle she’s been trying to hold back slips out. “I have absolutely no idea.” _

_ A waiter brings a pair of drinks and sets them down on the table in front of Matty and Ethan. _

_ “Gracias.” Ethan lifts his own glass. “Time for the toasts.” _

_ “Wait, wait.” Matty says. _

_ Ethan lowers his glass partway, frowning. “Um Hmm? Huh?”  _

_ “Before we drink, we need to talk.” _

_ “Oh, do we have to? We're having such a good time.” He grins. “And we’re about to have a better one. The tequila here is fantastic.” _

_ “We're having such a good time because we don't know anyone down here, Ethan.” Matty wants to let this night be special, detached from reality and all the worries and struggles that that entails, but the truth is, she’s never been good at not seeing the big picture. At not thinking through the consequences. It’s why impulsive Ethan balances her so well. “Eventually, we have to go back home. So what are we gonna tell the Agency?”  _

_ “Well, as far as they are concerned, we're on an op. And I don't think they're gonna go looking for a marriage certificate in the Osa Peninsula.” _

_ Matty nods. She knows there are some people who will be watching more closely, who will scrutinize any change in their behavior in the office halls. But they’ll never be able to prove anything. “We’ll need to be careful. And the rings. I know they’re not traditional, but…” _

_ “Don’t worry. I’m going to wear mine on a chain, if anyone asks I’ll say it’s a family heirloom,” Ethan says. “Best cover stories are mostly true, right?” _

_ “I can’t argue with that. Seeing as I’m the one who gave you that piece of advice,” Matty says.  _

_ “To your advice.” Ethan drains his whole glass in one go. “Let's go dance, before this hits and I trample your feet or start doing something truly embarassing.” _

_ “Now that, the agency might be able to track down.” Matty chuckles. “Okay, let’s dance.” _

* * *

A STREET CORNER IN CYPRUS

TODAY, IT’S KIND OF AN IMPORTANT ONE 

Mac looks up when Riley calls for Bozer to stop the van. “According to this, he should be on that street over there.” She slides open the van door and points.

Mac hears a soft intake of breath from Matty, and a whispered, “Ethan.” Mac can’t tell which of the men over there is Ethan Regins, but he’s glad Matty can confirm they’ve found him. Unfortunately, he’s definitely not alone, and his friends have brought some very big guns. 

Jack frowns. “Matty, something tells me that Ethan and his pals are about to break a few major laws here.”

“That's a lot of firepower. Do we abort?” Leanna asks. 

“S-Company can realize Ethan's a spy any moment, at which point those men will turn on him,” Matty replies. “Go. Secure the asset.”

Mac nods, and jumps out of the van with Jack, nearly tripping over the lip of the van door. The door slides shut behind them. 

He and Jack walk into the lobby, and Mac glances at the building directory posted on a wall.  _ Where would they go? _

“Riley, you got eyes?” Jack asks. “How’s it coming in there, kiddo?” 

Mac’s finding himself all too aware of how many times the team asks Riley for a favor, simply assuming she’ll manage to pull it off. How much he assumes about her skills, himself. How often the team asks her to do the nigh-impossible, because they know she’s done it before. He can tell everyone else is feeling the same way. Their requests for Riley’s help are now shaded with softer tones and more politeness.  _ It’s not that we don’t love her, all the other times. It’s that we forget she’s human too. _

“Just got behind the building's security system. Ethan's entering the office of a biotech firm on the fifth floor, along with all those other goons.”

“Any idea what they're doing?” Mac asks.

“Guessing they're here to steal something, Mac. That biotech firm is directly tied to a Russian research and development project. One that specializes in creating next generation chemical and biological weapons.”

“Okay, well, we don’t really want to let them leave with what they came for, but the top priority is still Ethan. Right, Matty?”

“Correct, Mac. Stop the theft if you can, but if we can get Ethan back home, he could give us enough to crack S-Company’s operations wide open. All of them. If we have to make a small sacrifice now, letting something this dangerous fall into their hands, that’s a risk I’m willing to take.”

Mac nods. As much as he hates it, he’s in agreement. S-Company getting their hands on biological weapons is bad. S-Company managing to kill the one person who’s likely spent years mining actionable intel on them, that’s catastrophic. 

Jack frowns. “Oh, man, I'm wearing this peashooter and we're about to get into a gunfight with a bunch of guys with automatic weapons? That is not gonna go well for us and I'm an optimist.”

“Clearly,” Mac says, raising an eyebrow.

“So, how are we doing this?” 

Mac has the beginnings of a plan. Not a great one, but it’s something, and it involves the fewest moving parts he can think of, and the least liklihood of them all getting caught by S-Company. “If I can separate Ethan from his guys upstairs, can you take care of the ones guarding the exits?” 

“Yeah, yeah, I'm pretty sure I can clear you an escape route but how do you propose on doing said separating? Please tell me it’s not something suicidal, Mac. Please.” 

Mac grimaces. “I got a plan, but it kinda sorta hinges on Ethan actually wanting to come with us.”

“Kinda sorta? That kinda sorta sounds like a terrible plan, man.”

“I'm not loving it, either, but it's what we got.” He switches his comms to open channels. “Bozer, I’m gonna need you to make a call.”

A few minutes later, Mac’s sitting in a corner, half hidden by a desk, listening to Bozer’s spot on impression of a scam telemarketer. 

“Merry Christmas and congratulations. You've just won a free cruise to the Bahamas, courtesy of Dragonfly Cruises. That's right. Dragonfly Cruises think you deserve to get away. We're offering you a chance to escape all your troubles at the end of the hall on a luxurious upper deck.”  _ Good thing we have someone on the team who likes writing cheesy movie scripts where the spies communicate in codes like this. Now we just have to see if it works. _

The next minute, a dark-haired man with a string of tattoos on his neck steps into the room, looking around. Mac waits until he walks past, then stands up and grabs the guy in a hold Jack taught him, covering Ethan’s mouth with his hand and praying the man isn’t going to bite him like a feral dog. Ethan starts struggling immediately, and Mac doesn’t blame him. He wouldn’t like to be grabbed from behind like this, either, especailly not when he’s working this kind of undercover. “Don't move. Matty Webber sent me.” At the name, Ethan goes stiff. “S-Company knows there's an undercover CIA agent in their ranks. Doesn't matter what you've done or where your allegiances lie. They will kill you when they find out it's you. Nod if you understand.” Ethan nods slowly. 

“Good. Then you understand you have to come with me.” Ethan nods again, and Mac releases his hand from over the man’s mouth. It looks like Ethan’s starting to say something, but there isn’t really time for questions and explanations. Mac starts moving toward the elevator and motions for Ethan to follow him.

“All right, Jack, asset's secure. Headed your way. How's it looking down there?” He can hear a few faint shouts and grunts over the comms, but it sounds like Jack’s holding his own pretty well. 

“All right, good work, Mac. I'll have the building perimeter clear by the time you hit the lobby.” 

Mac jumps as a woman’s scream cuts through the building. It sounds like it came from the office he and Ethan just walked away from. He turns back toward the sound.

“Riley, what was that?” 

He can hear the frantic tapping of her keys over the comms. “It's bad, Mac. The janitor just accidentally walked in the middle of S-Company's robbery. They're talking about killing her.”

“I can’t leave her in there,” Mac says with a sigh. “Jack, I’m sending Ethan to you.”

“Hell no, man, I’m coming in there to back you up. Ethan can get down here to the van himself.”

“Jack, by the time you got here that woman would be dead. Ethan, take the stairs to the lobby. Our van's across the street. If Jack’s still there he’ll show you.” 

There’s plenty of stuff in his bag, things he grabbed from Lutsky’s house, to make an improvised smoke bomb in a matter of seconds. Now he’s glad Jack sent him scavenging. He holds onto the bottle full of chemicals, creeping down the hallway to the room where he can hear a lot of yelling in what he thinks is Greek. There’s a large rolling car with two racks of some sort of bio-storage canisters on them, and Mac grimaces, wondering exactly what this theft was about. Two men are holding guns on a woman who’s just getting down on her knees on the floor.

If he waits any longer they’ll have their aim on a stationary target and might shoot her accidentally in the confusion. While she’s still moving is his only shot. Mac flings the smoke bomb into the roof, pulling his shirt up over his face to shield him from the noxious gases that explode as soon as the bottle hits the floor.  _ Hopefully, if they can’t see, they won’t rsik shooting when they have some sort of potential bioweapon in the room.  _ He can hear coughs and yells, and he makes his way through the thick cloud, squinting to avoid getting as much in his eyes. 

He can still feel tears running down his face when he gets a grip on the janitor’s arm. “Come with me, now!” He doesn’t know if she speaks English at all, but he hopes she knows a rescue when she sees one. 

She scrambles to her feet and follows him, even as bullets start flying all around them.  _ So much for not risking releasing a bioweapon. Guess S-Company doesn’t really care who dies, even their own men, as long as they get rid of whoever’s seen them at work.  _ Mac pushes the janitor in front of him, it’s at least a little more protection for her.  _ Better me taking a bullet than her.  _ Even if Jack does scold him.

Mac grabs a couple of the silver canisters off the cart and throws them behind him, hoping that in the smoke the thuds and clatter will distract the gunmen, then pulls the whole cart across the door.  _ It’ll slow them down. Not much, but a little.  _

“Riley, the elevators!” Mac gasps out between coughs, the smoke he made is much fainter in the halls but he can still taste it on his tongue.

“I got you!” Riley says. The bell dings and the doors open, and Mac shoves the janitor in. “Mac, wait, there’s…”

“Do not move.” Mac turns around to find a gun leveled at his head. S-Company must have stationed a guard out here out of view of the cameras. Or sent someone looking for Ethan. 

And then there’s a crack of metal on bone and the man falls limply to the floor. Mac looks up, staring at Ethan.  _ He didn’t leave? He came back? _

“Tell Matty I'm sorry,” Ethan says. “I’ll hold them as long as I can.” He turns around and the last thing Mac sees of him before the elevator doors close is the man slipping a fresh mag into his gun. 

He takes a deep, shaky breath, and a hot pain sears through his side, making him gasp and drawing out a short choked-off cry. Apparently being a human shield did earn him an injury after all. 

Mac presses a hand to the gash in his side. The blood is hot, welling up under his hand, but there isn’t a lot of it. He doesn’t think it’s even a through-and-through, just a graze. The wound stings and burns, and he grimaces, biting his lip as he continues applying pressure.  _ I can’t stop, no matter how much it hurts. _

“Guys, Ethan's in trouble. He-he outed himself to save me. I don't have him. Do you copy?” Mac asks, feeling dizzy and distant and faint.

“We copy. I think they already figured it out, Mac, there’s an inbound van with probably a dozen more S-Company soldiers inbound,” Riley says. “No, Jack, you can’t do him any good right now. Stay put. Mac, your best chance is hiding somewhere in the building.”

“Got it. I’m going to stop the elevator for a little while. Where’s Ethan?” Mac asks, almost afraid to hear.

“Well, he hasn’t made his last stand yet. Once your elevator left, he headed for the stairs. Jack, cover him on his way out.” Mac can practically hear Jack grinding his teeth at being forced not to come rushing in for Mac. “Mac, we’ll tell you when the building’s clear.” 

Mac pulls out his knife, removes the cover from the control buttons, and begins twisting wires together. “The...um...the elevator shaft should pro...protect us from them. I’m g-going to lodge it between two f-floors.” 

“How will we get out?” The woman asks.

Mac would promise he’d do it, but his vision is swimming, his wound is on fire, and he’s thinking he’s probably going to pass out in the next few seconds. “W-when the sh...shooting stops, p-press the button for ground level. I l-left that one...working…”

He slides slowly down the wall of the elevator, the janitor’s screams fading out as the world tilts and blurs. 

* * *

Jack ducks as the door flies open and someone rushes out, followed by a hail of bullets. “All right, I got eyes on Ethan.” He crouches behind a car as anothe vehicle screeches up, more men climbing out. “I can't get close. These guys are packing too much hardware.” A car somewhere on the street roars to life, and Jack watches a small black vehicle race around the turns, tires squealing and smoking. 

The only upside of this is that the S-Company mercs seem totally fixated on Ethan. Almost all of them pile into their van and give chase, leaving just two to comb the area. Jack picks them off easily, then stands up.

“Sorry Matty, we lost him.”

“I still have his phone signal,” Riley says. “As soon as Mac gets here, we can follow him.”   
“If you have it, so do they,” Leanna says. “He’ll probably…” The next second Jack hears a frustrated curse from Riley. “...get rid of it.”

But the thing is, Mac should be here by now. Jack doesn’t like the fact that he’s heard nothing from the kid since he saved the janitor. Maybe the two of them were laying low until the shooting stopped, but it’s stopped. And Mac knows time is of the essence.

Jack rushes into the building, still listening to his team’s coonversation in his ear.

“I don’t have Ethan, but I still have his pursuers,” Riley says. “As long as he doesn’t lose them before we get there, we can track him through them. They don’t know I’m inside their network.”

“That’s great, Riles. Can you see Mac?”

“No, I lost him once they got in the elevator, there’s no cameras in it. But...they never got out,” she says weakly. 

The elevator door dings, and Jack turns toward it, catching a glimpse of two shapes huddled at the bottom.  _ No, they’re not dead, they can’t be, I heard Mac talking… _

“Mac!” Jack shouts. 

Mac doesn’t look up, but the janitor does, her face flushed and frightened. “He just...he moved...they were going to shoot me, I don’t know what happened, he fell.”

“Wait here for the police. They’ve been called.” Jack pushes her aside as gently as he can manage at the moment and bends over. Mac’s gasping, trembling in pain, hands pressed tightly to his left side. Jack lifts him gently and carries him to the back of their van, laying him out on the floor while Leanna grabs the first aid kit and Matty sits down beside him.

“Mac?” Matty asks gently, and Mac stirs at the sound of her voice, blinking sluggishly.  _ Sure, wake up for her and not me, kid. I see how it is.  _ But he knows why. Jack’s voice means Mac can rest, that he’s safe. Matty’s means they’re on mission. With a job left to do.

Mac’s breath is coming as short, hoarse, panting gasps. “Matty, I'm so sorry. I couldn't save them both. I had to choose.”  _ Of course he apologizes for someone else’s behavior while he’s bleeding out. _ Jack shakes his head, ripping open a package of quick-clot. 

“Mac, we're past that now.” Matty presses a handful of gauze to Mac’s side, and Mac hisses, curling in on himself in pain. “Ethan made a choice, so did you.” Her eyes are full of hurt, but also understanding. “He never would have let them hurt an innocent bystander any more than you would.” 

“How bad is it?” Riley asks.

“Just a graze,” Mac whispers. 

“Sure, sure.” Jack pulls Mac’s shirt away from the wound. The black cloth was hiding the blood. “Wait, you’re not kidding?”

“Why is he…” Riley asks. 

Jack has the horrible feeling that he knows exactly what happened.  _ S-Company wanted something inside that biotech firm badly. So whatever they were after can’t be nice.  _ And clearly they’d already managed to get it out when Mac arrived, thanks to what Riley saw on cameras. “Mac, what did you touch in that room?”

“I...I picked something up to throw. As a distraction. I was in a hurry, I didn’t really see what it was,” Mac says. “They were shooting everywhere, I heard bullets ping off the cart as we passed it.” He frowns. “It...it was a silver canister, and...I think it must have been hit, because it felt sticky. I didn’t…” he gasps. “Really register that at the time. Thought we were gonna die.” 

Matty’s face goes stony. “Riley, what was in that biotech firm exactly?” Jack can already hear her typing, she’s way ahead of Matty on that. 

“A lot of things. But thanks to the camera footage, I can read the labels on the canisters S-Company was stealing. And match them to files in the company database...and bingo.” She frowns. “It’s a new bioweapon toxin. Some kind of fungal spore derivative. It’s so new that the Phoenix database doesn’t even have a record of its manufacture.” She clicks a few more times. “There’s documentation on it in the biotech firm’s files, at least. It’s a fast acting neurotoxin, and their content manifests show that they manufactured both the toxin and an antitoxin and had them both stored in that facility.”

“Is the antidote still in there?” Jack asks. “Can we get it?”

“According to the cameras, S-Company stole both the substance and the antitoxin. One of their men has the intact containers now, but Ethan had the antitoxin vials.”

“Get a response team on those thieves. Make sure authorities know that they’re carrying a bioweapon,” Matty says, voice clipped.

“The good news is it’s not weaponized yet,” Riley says.

“Not weaponized yet? Riley, are you  _ blind? _ ” Jack asks, nodding to where Mac is shaking on the floor with Leanna helping Jack support him, trying to somehow make it easier to ride out the terrible waves of pain coursing through his system. 

“It has to enter the body in aerosol form...or through any open wound or lesion,” Riley says. “When Mac put pressure on that gunshot wound, he contaminated it.” She frowns. “But those canisters contained a liquified version of the toxin that couldn’t aerosolize, a sort of precaution against damage in transit. So unless it gets in the eyes or mouth of anyone responding, they won’t be affected. So masks will protect them.” Jack can’t bring himself to care. It’s too late to protect Mac.

_ I thought I was going to lose him to a deadly virus. I can’t lose him to this. _ “How long does he have, Riley?”

“Based on testing, on animal subjects, the toxin takes at least three hours to cause death if absorbed through broken skin. In aerosol form, it’s deadly in ten minutes.” Jack rolls his shoulders, trying to ease the tension. “So I guess Mac’s lucky. Sort of.” She grimaces suddenly. “Shit. Quite a few test subjects experienced some kind of organ failure in half that time. It wasn’t immediately fatal, but it contributed to death. It seems to attack the liver and kidneys.”

“Damn it.” Jack whispers. “How soon did that happen?” 

“Within an hour and a half of exposure to the toxin. From the reports, it looks like the reason the toxin damages the kidneys and liver is the body’s attempt to filter it from the bloodstream.” Jack doesn’t need technical specifics. He needs whatever can cure his kid.

“He’s been contaminated for what, half an hour?” Leanna asks. “So we have to get to Ethan in the next hour or it’ll be too late.” 

“Flush the wound the best you can. Once we catch up to Ethan, he should be able to give us the antitoxin,” Matty says. “Bozer, floor it. Now.” 

* * *

Matty hasn’t bitten her fingernails in over two decades. She was sure she’d kicked the habit. But as their van careens around corners, accompanied by Riley’s constant directional updates from her trace on the S-Company phones, and Mac’s soft whimpers and groans as the toxin ravages his body, she successively bites each one down to the quick.

“We’re gonna find him,” Jack says. Matty has no idea if he’s reassuring her, or himself, or Mac. It doesn’t really matter. All that matters now is that Mac’s life now also hinges on them finding Ethan before S-Company does. 

“The vans are trapping him,” Riley says. “They’ve split up. It looks like one is going to come in from the opposite direction and pin him between them.”

“Then at the moment we only have one van of these guys to deal with?” Jack asks. 

“I guess. And they should be…” A speeding vehicle crosses the street in front of them, the black car Matty remembers seeing pull away from the office building. “...Right behind Ethan, right there.”

“Okay, time for some Fast and Furious,” Bozer says. “Jack, I’m about to make you proud.”

Bozer pulls out directly into traffic, clipping the speeding van’s front quarterpanel and sending it careening off the road into a signpost. Everyone is shaken, and Mac lets out a louder groan, but Matty watches in relief as the van behind them remains a steaming pile of wreckage. It’s not going anywhere, and they’re still functional, even though there’s now a terrible screeching rattle in the rear of the vehicle somewhere. 

“Nice work, Bozer!” Riley cheers. “ _ Now _ we really only have one van left.”

“And here I thought you weren’t listening to my pursuit driving wisdom,” Jack says. “Okay, Boze, that other van’s going to stop Ethan for us. This is all gonna hinge on whether we can make them believe we’re their backup long enough to get Ethan out of their hands.”

Bozer nods. Up ahead, Matty watches the black car screech to a stop in the face of a van parked across the road, blocking traffic. The car angles and turns, coming back toward them. 

“He’s going to pass us!” Bozer yells.

“No, he’s not.” Jack throws the side door. “Matty!”

She joins Jack at the door just as Bozer angles the van to the side enough to stop Ethan’s car from passing.

Ethan’s vehicle screeches to a halt inches from smashing into Matty and Jack in the door of the van. He looks up, and Matty catches his eyes.

“Ethan.” A whisper is all she can manage, but it’s enough.

“Matty!” He leaps out of the car, and Jack pulls him inside, slamming the door just as the S-Company van up ahead opens fire.  _ They must have realized they’d been had. _ Bozer screeches off down a side street, and Matty hopes it takes the other van enough time to turn around and follow them that they’ll have a head start to lose them. 

Ethan is half-sitting, half lying on the floor of the van, staring at Matty like...like he hasn’t seen her in a thousand years. “Matty. I didn’t think...I thought you...There's so much to say.”

“I'm so sorry, there's no time. I need the antitoxin.” Matty holds out her hand. “One of my agents is contaminated.” She nods to where Mac is lying, now almost silent.  _ We have to be in time to save him, we have to be. _

Ethan reaches into the duffel bag, pulling out a thick plastic container. Matty unclasps the lid and opens it. Inside are three narrow test-tube racks, each holding five thin vials of a pale purple liquid. 

“Riley, you have the specs for the antitoxin? How much do we need?”

“According to this, you need one cc for dermal abrasion exposure, two for aerosolized.”

“Okay. Draw it off and get it in him, the sooner the better,” Matty says. She watches Leanna administer the dose, while Jack holds Mac’s hand tightly. 

It seems like it takes forever for the drug to take effect, but Mac’s breathing begins to ease, and slowly his muscles lose the unnatural rigidity that was forming. Matty lets herself feel a moment of relief. She asks Bozer to stop the van at a police station, and hands the case of antitoxin to him. 

“Bozer, get this to the local authorities. Just in case the raid on that S-Company team goes very wrong. And let them know exactly what the exposure protocols are.” 

He nods mutely, and hurries off. Jack takes the driver’s seat, and Matty feels Ethan’s hand on her arm. She turns to look at him, and is shocked by the fearful earnestness in his eyes. 

“Now I need  _ your _ help. They're gonna take my family.”

“Your family?”

“Matty, I’m sorry. I’ll explain everything later, and I didn’t want to ask until I knew your agent was going to live. But S-Company knows where they are, and they probably have men on their way right now to get my wife and daughter and use them to force me to hand myself over.”

“Wife? Daughter?” It feels like knives in Matty’s heart.  _ I thought, all those years, I thought that not having children wasn’t an issue, that that didn’t make me any less worth loving in his eyes. _ But now...now she can’t be sure. But Ethan’s right. This is something to talk about later. When those innocent people aren’t in harm’s way. 

“Who is he to you?” Ethan asks, glancing at Mac who’s shifting restlessly on the floor under the thermal blanket spread over him. “Because I’ve seen you worried about a fellow agent, Matty. And that wasn’t like that. That was parental.”

“Angus MacGyver is like a son to me.” Matty says. “Probably the closest thing I’ll get to one.” She knows Ethan’s thinking about the doctor’s report from all those years ago, about them sitting in the living room discussing their options, wondering if they should adopt, and then wondering if maybe not having a family in this business was a blessing in disguise.  _ Apparently, Ethan actually wanted one anyway, even though he said the danger we were in was too much. Because apparently S-Company is less of a threat? _ She can’t help the bitter feelings surging up in her chest.  _ If we had a child, would he have done this to them too? _ She doesn’t know. But the man in front of her really isn’t the man she married. Ethan Reigns is dead and gone, and his cover identity, Tobias, is all that’s left. Because Tobias is the one with the wife and children. The one who had no one waiting for him back home in the states. 

She realizes Ethan’s gone stiff, watching her. “Angus MacGyver? As in any relation to James…”

“His son.” Matty shakes her head. “He’s nothing like James. I had my reservations, but Mac is one of the best agents I’ve ever put in the field.” She doesn’t want Ethan to make the same mistake she did, to place the sins of the father on the son’s shoulders. 

“I saw James in person. What he was capable of.” Ethan frowns. “There were rumors he had a son, but he never talked about it. I always figured he was protecting the kid, but after a while I started wondering if he was protecting himself.” 

“He was probably ashamed to admit he had a son as good as Mac.” Matty sighs. “If it weren’t for Mac, you’d be dead right now. And I might be as well.” She’s lost track of how many times Mac has saved them.

“Well, that’s a relief to hear.”

“I can give you a little more peace of mind than that, Ethan. We finally caught James; with Mac’s help. He’s in Phoenix custody now.”

“Thank God.” Ethan sighs. “I tried to get him, all those years ago. I risked everything, cut ties with my handlers and the CIA, because I knew if we didn’t bring him in, he could kill thousands. I had a sting lined up, everything perfect. And then something happened. Somehow, James found out. He didn’t know who set him up, and...I’m sorry to say I let another man take the fall. I told myself he was just one of S-Company’s minions, that he got what he deserved running with this crowd, but...after that, I stopped setting up any operations for the CIA. It was too risky.” He rubs his face with his hand. “And James disappeared after the sting failed.” 

“You did all you could.”

“I just wish I could have brought him down myself. Sooner.”

“So do I, Ethan. So do I.” James has been responsible for all too much suffering.  _ If Ethan could have gotten him then...Mac might not have been put through hell at his hands a few months ago. He might never have ended up with Murdoc. _

But maybe there’s always been an inevitability to that. Like the inevitability of this relationship.  _ I think we both knew that someday, the job would come between us. We both knew that it would tear us apart, and there would be no going back. _ And now, she’s going to have to live with the fallout.

* * *

ETHAN REIGNS’S HOUSE

APPARENTLY SOME AGENTS DO GET THE WHITE PICKET FENCE LIFE

JUST NOT FOREVER

Mac comes back to awareness slowly. He can hear snatches of conversation, something about Ethan’s family, and once he hears his own name, but he’s too tired to acknowledge it. 

But he is coming around to the point where he feels coherent enough to sit up and talk by the time the van stops somewhere. He looks out the windshield to see a small white and tan house, with three big black vehicles parked outside. 

“S-Company beat us here,” Ethan says softly.  _ It must be his house. He said something about his family, a child.  _ Mac wonders what exactly happened after Ethan left Matty, but now isn’t the time to dwell on that. Innocent lives are at stake. A family who had no idea, more than likely, what they were getting caught up in. 

“You know, your family could've made it out,” Jack says. 

Ethan shakes his head. “No. They wouldn't run. Deena knows to go right to the panic room if anything happens.”

“Alright. Matty, Ethan, Leanna and I’ll go around back, you guys take the front door.”

“All right.” Mac watches Matty and Ethan grab their guns. There’s a fluidity to their movements that tells him how much time they spent together.  _ And he was still able to walk away from her. Even after all he must have promised, if he took the risk of marrying her while they were both still CIA.  _ It leaves a hard, painful knot in his chest that has nothing to do with the toxin leaving his body.  _ What if Jack did that to me? He promised to stay, but what if someday he leaves and the same person never comes back? _

He starts to stand up, but Jack gently pushes him back down. “Hey, hey, hey, hey. Mac, you’re in no condition to do this right now.” Jack frowns. “Your body’s still trying to flush out that toxin.”

Mac shakes his head, trying to force himself up on wobbly legs. “I can’t let those kids die.”

“We’ve got this,” Jack replies. “Stay in the van. Or do you want me to have someone stay with you, and have our little assault team a person down? Mac, I can’t be worried about you and fight off these S-Company goons. The most help you can give us is to stay put so we don’t have to think about whether you’re in danger.”

Mac swallows, but nods.  _ He’s right. I’m just going to be a liability in there.  _ The thought stings for a second, but he can’t argue its validity. He already knew he wasn’t actually going to be able to help fight. But maybe they’ll still need him.

“What if you run into something…”

“Mac, we have comms. And I’ve known you long enough you can talk me through anything I gotta build, okay?” Jack puts a reassuring hand on his shoulder. “You’ve already gone above and beyond to salvage this op, okay? Let us do this part.” 

* * *

Jack creeps as carefully as he can through the backyard. The evidence that a child lives here is everywhere, an abandoned swingset swaying slightly in the breeze, toys scattered around a lawn that is more bare earth than grass. It looks like Ethan’s daughter enjoys making roads for the toy vehicles. 

Jack is sort of glad that he took this entrance. It would be hard for Matty to walk through here and see the evidence of the life her husband lived without her. Jack kind of wants to punch the guy for breaking Matty’s heart like this, but then again, he’s seen guys do even more viscerally horrifying things undercover.  _ It changes people. Even the best of us. It can destroy the people we were. _ Jack’s been lucky to come out of his own more or less sane. Then again, he’s never been pretending to be a member of something as terrible as S-Company. 

When he gets to the door, he can hear the sound of power tools whirring.  _ Well, guess that means Ethan was right and his family went to the safe room. _ The door’s been kicked in, so Jack doesn’t have to worry about getting past a lock, and the tools are making so much noise he gets into the hall where he can see three men trying to cut open the safe room door before they notice he’s there. 

“Hey, Bob Villa,” Jack shouts. “Home improvements are over.” The next second he’s punching one of the guys in the face. One of the en, holding a saw, spins around to face him, and Jack blocks the saw with a small hall table that is turned into splinters. _ Was it really just a day ago I was joking with Marty about chainsaw related murder? _ He can’t believe he almost actually lost a hand to a power saw. 

A shot from Leanna ends that attempt, and Jack chases the third man into the living room, tackling him over the back of a couch. He can hear gunshots in the other part of the house, and the shot patterns confirm that at least one of the shooters is Matty. The one shooting almost in sync with her is probably Ethan.

_ I was always jealous that she got the forbidden relationship and Sarah and I never could. But maybe we were lucky after all.  _ He pulls his own gun and heads in to back up Matty and Ethan, but the shooting’s already stopped by the time he gets there. 

Leanna rushes up behind him, breathless. “Ethan, your family’s inside, they’re safe. I told them you were coming, but they won’t open the door until you tell them it’s safe.”

“I have a password, something I’d only use if I wasn’t being forced to say it,” Ethan says. “I’m coming.”

He bends down in front of the door and whispers something that might be Greek. It’s certainly all Greek to Jack. There’s a sobbing reply, and then a click of a lock disengaging. But the door doesn’t move.”

“It won't open.” The voice on the other side sounds frantic. Ethan shoves on the door, but it remains stubbornly stuck.” 

“Yeah, it took too much damage. That's not gonna work,” Jack says. “I think now’s the time to get…”

“Let me see.”  _ Well, look who listens so well. _ Jack shakes his head. Mac probably got out of the van the second the shooting stopped.  _ I guess we’re lucky he didn’t run in here in the middle of it with homemade tear gas and get himself shot. _

“Just give me a second. Hang on.” Mac leans down in front of the door. “Can you hear me in there? We're gonna get you out, okay?” 

“Daddy?” A small voice asks. 

“I'm here, baby. We're gonna get you out of there,” Ethan promises, glancing at Mac, who’s grabbing some of the discarded power tools and taking parts of them off with his knife. 

“Okay, Mac, what are we doing here?” Jack asks. Mac thinks better and faster when he’s explaining. And it might give Ethan a little more peace of mind about what’s happening. Jack overheard the conversation about James. And while he can’t blame Ethan for probably having suspicions, he wants the man to know that Mac’s trustworthy. 

“Okay, so. I’m transferring energy from this power drill,” Mac holds up the tool, which has been partially cannibalized already, “into spreaders that'll have enough mechanical energy to pry open this door.” He holds up some long metal bars and a few other items. “Like the Jaws of Life they use in car wrecks.”

“Cool.”

“He does this a lot?” Ethan asks. 

“Well, it’s the first time for this. But he’s always making things.” 

“Okay, we’re ready. Tell them to stand back from the door, I’m not sure how bad the damage is and what will happen,” Mac says.

Jack watches Mac’s improvised spreader begins pushing the door away from the frame. And a few moments later, the door is open, and a small girl rushes out and wraps her arms around Ethan’s neck. 

“Daddy.”

Ethan tangles a hand in the girl’s long brown hair. “Hey, hey. It’s okay. It’s okay.” And Jack turns away from the shattered look in Matty’s eyes.

* * *

THE WAR ROOM

MATTY ALREADY KNOWS HOW THIS CONVERSATION WILL END.

Matty’s finding it easier to keep the conversation about business, right now. To focus on the mission, the intel, Ethan’s role. “The agents who debriefed you said you never stopped stockpiling intel against S-Company. Even after you stopped reporting back. That intel will help us to strike some serious blows against the organization. Maybe even give us a map into placing another UC agent inside.”

“Good. I'm glad.” Ethan sighs. “You look good, Matty. New job, all of this, I'm really proud of you.”

“I love what I do.” Matty doesn’t know how much she can say before she snaps. And apparently that’s as much as she can do, because the next words spill out of her mouth unplanned. “Ethan, what happened?” 

Ethan looks suddenly guilty, unable to meet Matty’s eyes.“You need to know that I didn't plan any of this. Things got complicated.” 

“Wow. That's vague.” Matty frowns. “Try again.” She’s sacrificed and sacrificed to keep their relationship, and now to try and save Ethan. The least he can do is give her an explanation that makes her feel like this was worth it. Like she didn’t almost throw away her career, and irreparably damage her relationship with Riley, for someone who doesn’t even care enough to stay committed to her.

“At first, I was just playing the role that was required by the assignment. I did what was needed to fit in with those men.” Ethan sighs. “Eventually, I met Deena, and then our daughter was born two years, three months and 12 days ago. And then, all of a sudden, the role that I was playing in order to survive long enough to get back to you, it just became my life, just like that. But I need you to know I never stopped loving you. Not for one day, not for one second. And I'm so, so sorry.”

Matty sighs. She wants to be angry, but the truth is, she didn’t hold onto their relationship either. She never once considered that Ethan could have been playing a long game. She was hurt and bitter and angry and she wanted him to pay. And she won’t make the same mistake again. Not when she has the chance to repair whatever of their friendship might still remain. “You have nothing to apologize for. The direction our lives took was as much my fault as it is yours.” She sighs. “What are you going to do now?”

“Matty, with your blessing, I’d like to go back to the family I created. I love what we were, but we can never be that again, and we both know that would always be a shadow on anything we rebuilt.” Matty nods. Ethan slips a silver chain over his head, his ring is hanging from it. “Matty, thank you for everything. Thank you for the good years. And for saving my life, and my family.”

Matty can’t reply. She just stands there holding the cold silver as the door closes behind Ethan, finally letting the tears fall.

There’s a hesitant knock, and she looks up, wiping her face. “Come in.”

It’s Jack. “So, I’m guessing…”

“He’s going back to his family.” She sniffs again, and Jack bends down to fold her into a hug. 

“Well, you know, yours is right here.” 

“I don’t know anymore, Jack, I don’t know.” She could handle Ethan walking away. She buried him a long time ago in every way that counted. She’s made her peace with him becoming a different person. And even though he’s a different kind of different than she expected, she still can accept it. But it’s not just Ethan who’s walking away from her right now. The War Room is conspicuously empty of everyone but her and Jack.

“Now what’s that supposed to mean, boss lady?” 

“I’m afraid I’m going to lose Riley.”

She doesn’t need to tell Jack. For all that he’s been polite and said nothing, he heard the conversation on the jet. He knows the truth. But there’s nothing but kindness and compassion in his eyes. “She’s tough. And she’s not one to walk away. Sure, she’ll be pissed for a while, but that won’t last forever.”

“But I sold her this life on a lie, I dragged her into a world of danger and secrets and loss and pain because of something I wanted. I treated her like an asset to be coerced.” Matty swipes at her tears. “And I kept the truth from her all these years.”

“Because you couldn’t tell her. Ethan was classified. Highly classified. She’ll understand that, Matty.” Jack holds her a little tighter. 

“It’s not just Riley. It’s Mac too.”

“Matty, in case you forgot somethin’, you didn’t recruit Mac. You didn’t even want to recruit him.”

“That’s the point, Jack.” Matty wipes away another round of tears. “I wanted him gone because I thought James was the reason Ethan went dark.”

Jack frowns.  _ It would serve me right if this pissed him off too.  _ He was always so protective of Mac, defended him to her. Kept trying to cover for him, to protect him from Matty’s ire. Once he finds out why… 

“The last communication Ethan sent to his handler mentioned that James MacGyver had begun working on a large project for S-Company, and that Ethan himself had gained enough pull to be able to get inside on it. He was poised to help us take James down. And then he just stopped talking to us. All any of us could assume was that he’d caved. James has a history of flipping agents, it was suspected that he’d caused as many as twenty OPI agents to go rogue when he did, they were ferreted out over the years but everyone was on edge.” She sighs. “We had information from reliable sources that James was seen afterward working closely with a man who fit Ethan’s description, it seemed to confirm the theory. But we never caught either of them.” 

Jack takes a deep breath. “So you figured if James could turn Ethan, he’d had ample opportunity to groom his own son. And Mac’s record didn’t do him any favors.” He pulls back slightly, and Matty feels a fresh wave of tears roll down her face. She’s successfully alienated Jack too. Everyone who cares about her, steamrolled over by her desperate search for the man she thought betrayed her. 

Jack looks her directly in the eyes, his own burning with every bit of intensity she’s ever seen from him on a mission. “I want to blame you. I want to be mad, right now. Cause I was scared as hell you were gonna send the kid back to prison. But Matty, you weren’t here for the first of it. For when  _ I  _ threatened him with that. When I didn’t trust his methods, when I gave him hell for every little thing. And I had no excuse.” Jack’s shoulders heave with the depth of his breath. “Matty, I looked at his file and I saw someone who could be a monster for no other reason than that someone said it about him. I looked at him, and I didn’t even see his father, like you did, I just saw a criminal that I’d met when he was wearing an orange jumpsuit and shackled to a table. I judged him just because that’s what everyone else had done. So if you’re guilty, I’m guiltier.” He looks like he’s about to cry as well. “And there is not a day that goes by that I don’t think about it. About how badly I could have hurt him if I wanted to. And it scares me. And it’s always gonna scare me, but it reminds me of something too. It reminds me that sometimes people aren’t what we believe, that I can’t ever decide who they are without knowing them. I didn’t screw up as badly as I could have, and it gave me a chance to grow. You’ve got that chance now, Matty. It’s not gonna be easy, it’s probably never gonna stop hurting and being a weight of guilt you carry around, but it’ll get lighter.”

Matty wants to believe that, but she’s not so sure she can. “I have been so fixated on Ethan, for so long, and it’s going to cost me the family I built. The family who loves me. Or at least who did.”  _ I should have been happy. I should have taken Mac and Riley and Jack and let them take the place of someone who left me. But I never really let go of Ethan. And I stayed in the past and now I don’t have him or them. _

It’s the kind of poetic justice that only seems to happen in books, except that now it’s happening to her. It’s exactly the kind of moral of the story of so many children’s fairy tales.  _ The person who is never content with what he has loses it all. There’s so much in front of them, but they always want the one thing they can’t have, and sacrifice everything else good in their lives, only to have it vanish, or be nothing like they hoped.  _

“Boss lady, if you haven’t scared me off, trust me, you won’t scare off them kids either. Might be some rough patches, not gonna lie to you. And yeah, Mac’s sad puppy eyes are a killer. But it gets better. I promise.” 

* * *

Mac shifts on his chair in the War Room, his paperclip sculpture of a wedding ring mangled, the heart almost unrecognizably crumbled. He guesses it’s fitting.  _ I always wondered, when I was growing up, if James had a mistress, another family somewhere, that he liked more than he liked me. _ The thought had carved a deep, painful hole in his chest. And it’s not like finding out his dad was an international terrorist was  _ better, _ but at least Mac hadn’t been replaced. James had just never really loved him or cared about him in the first place. 

Matty’s experiencing the reverse. Believing Ethan was a traitor for years, only to find out that he’s stayed away because he has a new family. Mac knows she’s hurting. 

And it’s not just that. He overheard some of what Riley said earlier. He couldn’t really help it, and even though he wishes he hadn’t heard it, he can’t undo that.  _ At least I knew they brought me in for what I could do. _ Although that’s really messed him up for a long time. Believing the only reason he was valued was his skills.  _ And now Riley’s feeling that same crisis.  _

He talked to her a little, before Matty asked for him to come to the War Room, alone. He knows they’ll have a lot more conversations about it before Riley can move on. He’s been up and down that slippery slope for years, even though he gets a little further up the hill each time before sliding back. And a hard family past only makes it worse. The abuse Riley endured has already made her devalue herself. This was just a further slap in the face, however unintentional.

But he can’t blame Matty either. He’s seen how she cares about Riley, even if right now Riley’s too hurt to see it clearly. Matty truly doesn’t see an asset whose only value comes from her skill set. She sees a competent agent who she loves like a daughter. 

He’s not sure exactly what Matty wants to talk to him about. Maybe taking dangerous risks. Maybe...

“Mac, I need to give you a long overdue apology.” Well, that’s not what he was expecting. At all. “The reason I treated you so harshly when we first met was that until recently, the CIA believed your father was the man instrumental in flipping Ethan’s allegiances.”

Mac takes a deep, shuddering breath.  _ Why am I not surprised he found another way to nearly ruin my life? _

“As it turned out, James was in fact the reason Ethan went dark, but he never managed to truly flip him. Ethan was trying to smoke him out, but then things went bad and all he could do was try to survive,” Matty says. “I didn’t know that, but it’s still no excuse. I was angry and bitter, I saw the son of a man who could turn the best agent and the best man I knew into a monster. I was sure he’d made you dangerous too, and your past seemed to confirm it.”

Mac swallows hard, staring at the ground. “You don’t have to apologize, Matty. You had ever right…”

“Not to judge you by your father’s actions. I had no right to look at you and see him, or to take out my own anger on you. And I am sorry.” Mac sees a muscle tremble in her neck, a quiver of her lip, a sparkling at the edges of her eyes.

“Thank you for telling me, Matty.” It’s all he can get out at the moment. 

“After Riley...I’ll understand if you need to be angry right now.”

He doesn’t. It’s sort of surprising. He gets angry so easily now. But there’s nothing but a cold cavern in his chest. Because unlike Riley, he’s used to this. Used to people judging him by his father’s name and his father’s deeds. And most importantly, he knew that was Matty’s motivation a long time ago. When he walked out of an interrogation room, away from Murdoc’s cruel smile, and demanded the truth, demanded to know if Murdoc’s cruel jabs were founded in anything real. 

He let out that anger a long time ago. It’s gone, and all that’s left is a hollow void. A void that, he thinks, is going to start getting smaller now. Now that he can see that Matty didn’t treat him coldly for impersonal judgment. She had a stake in it, she was bound up in what James did almost as much as Mac was, in her own way. 

_ He took something from both of us.  _

“I’m not mad. I’m actually not.”

“Still, Mac, the way I treated you was wrong.” 

Mac swallows.  _ I was terrified, back then. Afraid of my own shadow, afraid one wrong move would send me back to prison, back to the cartels inside.  _ Now, it’s hard to remember what those first weeks were like, now that Matty feels like a second mother to him. But sitting here, he can recall all of the pain and fear, the words sticking in his throat and trying to choke him when Matty asked why she ought to trust a convicted killer. 

_ But I’ve seen too many people eaten up by resentment and grudges. _ And he thinks, right now, Matty’s offering him the chance to do better than her. To let go of the past and start fresh.

“All’s forgiven, Matty.” 

* * *

THIS CONVERSATION WILL HURT

“Riley, we need to talk. About what you said earlier.” 

Riley takes a deep breath and looks down, fingers fiddling with a loose thread on her ripped jeans. “Matty, I’m sorry for what I did. That was uncalled for, and it was not the time to have that conversation.”

“I know. Which is why we’re having it now.” Matty pushes a mug of tea across the table. “Here.”

“Is this some kind of peace offering?”

“No, more like a bribe. I know this is the kind you like, and I want you to stay here and hear me out.” Matty smiles just a little, clearly trying to defuse the tension hovering in the room. 

“You didn’t have to bribe me. I want to hear what you have to say about all this,” Riley says. “I should have let you explain, but in the heat of the moment...I was angry, and hurt, and I said things I shouldn’t have.” She sighs. “But...I don’t know if I can just hear you out and move on.”

“Riley, I understand if you need some time.” Matty lowers her head. “This is my fault and I will do whatever I can to help you right now.”

“That’s not exactly what I mean.” Riley takes the mug and begins lifting and lowering the tea bag. The smell of cinnamon and pepper drifts through the room. “I spent six years in this world because of a lie. Because you told me this was  _ my  _ world. That I belonged here. And now, I don’t know what to think, Matty. I don’t know if this really is where I’m supposed to be.”

Matty’s face is a mixture of surprise and sadness.

Riley forges on. “All these years, every time I wanted to give up, every time I questioned my choices, every time I had to walk away from a relationship, every holiday I spent alone...I heard your voice in my head. I heard you saying I had potential, that I had talent, that I belonged.” 

“And you do.” Matty’s voice is firmer now. “From the moment I met you, I knew you had what it took to be an agent. And a good one. You faced me down and didn’t even blink, and that is not something I say lightly. You’re determined and brave and you know what you want. I knew you didn’t come to the CIA because of any of my convincing. You came because it was what you wanted. And I think you know that too.”

Riley nods slowly. “I guess I owe you an apology for that too. Because I really only joined to get a look at the agency from the inside. I planned to make a major hack and split. Get a look at the belly of the beast I’d been taking on for years, and make it hurt. But...something kept me there. Kept me trying to stay on the straight and narrow.” She takes a small sip of her tea. “It was you. It was everything you told me. On the hard days, the days I wanted to throw in the towel or rip someone’s head off. And I just wanted to know, was that real.”

“The things I told you were the truest things I have ever said.”

Riley nods. “I still think I’ll take you up on that offer of some time to think.” 

“I can respect that. Re-evaluate, see where you stand, whether you still believe you’re meant to be part of the Phoenix. Just ask yourself, Riley, do  _ you _ think you belong. Because it really doesn’t matter what I think, at all. This is your life. And it’s your choice.”


	11. Accident+Dreams+Miracles

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I MADE IT! The Christmas special is up and ready by Christmas! I'm pretty proud of myself...and I hope you guys enjoy this one!

### 310.5-Accident+Dreams+Miracles

DIANE DAVIS’S APARTMENT

A GOOD PLACE TO MAKE SOME NEW CHRISTMAS MEMORIES

“Here, this one’s my favorite.” Riley hands Abina the china kitten ornament she used to play with when she was little. The kitten has one ear that’s badly chipped, and a paw that broke off at one point and has been super-glued back on. But it’s still always going to be Riley’s favorite ornament.

“Thank you for letting me come with you,” Abina says. “I saw so many pictures of families decorating Christmas trees together. They looked so happy, hanging up ornaments, tangling their dog in the lights, unwrapping presents underneath it...”

Riley smiles sadly. _ I guess neither of us had that picture-perfect childhood. _ But it doesn’t mean they can’t make the memories they want now. 

“Well, you’re part of the family now, so you’re always welcome here,” Diane says. “Now, who’s ready for some hot chocolate and cookies?” 

“But we’re not done yet!” Abina says. “There are three more boxes of ornaments.”

“Yes, but I think we need a little extra sugar boost to get us through those,” Riley says. “Well, maybe you don’t. I remember when I had that much energy.”

Diane laughs. “I barely do. I wonder why kids are so full of it, when really, it’s us adults who want it the most?”

“Because life’s not fair,” Riley says with a chuckle. “And I have something for you, Abina.” She pulls out a little box carefully wrapped in paper.

“What is it?”

“Why don’t you open it up and see?” Riley grins, reaching for the saucepan. There’s no way she’s making packet cocoa tonight. And she has Jack’s recipe down by heart, she’ll just omit the alcohol.

Abina opens it slowly, then gasps. “It’s beautiful!” 

Riley grins. Ever since she used some of the last of her medical leave to take Abina to Portland to see her first real snow, Abina hasn’t stopped talking about it. She was obsessed with studying every flake that fell on her jacket and gloves, and didn’t want to go inside even when Riley could see that the girl was shivering. 

_ “None of them are exactly the same, right?” Abina asks. _

_ “That’s right.” _

_ “Then I want to see as many as I can. They deserve to be seen, not just dropped on the ground and stepped on, where they’re gone forever. They’re all special and I want them to know it.” _

_ Riley blinks away the tears welling up in her eyes, blaming them on the chilly wind. Abina knows all too well what it’s like to be overlooked and stepped on. And she doesn’t want that to happen to anyone or anything else. Not even a snowflake. _

“I asked Mac to make it special out of paperclips. There’s not another one like this anywhere in the whole wide world. Just like a real snowflake.” Riley grins, reveling in the massive smile Abina’s got as she holds up the sparkling collection of wires. “I did spray it with glue and roll it in the glitter, though.” She had glitter in her hair and clothes for days. But it was worth it. 

Riley stirs up the hot chocolate while Diane shows Abina how to mix the perfect cookie frosting and helps her decorate a reindeer and a snowman. Riley spreads a layer of plain frosting over a Santa cookie, she’s too hungry to bother with all the trimmings, and pours mugs of cocoa for them all, sitting down at the table with her family. 

Her phone rings when they’re halfway done (and Abina’s on her third cookie already) and she pulls it out. It’s Mac. _ He and Jack and Bozer are running a last minute op. And I couldn’t go because of the psych eval. _ Because she’s still not sure anymore that Phoenix is the place she fits best. _ Matty’s giving me the holidays to think and make a decision _. But she isn’t going to let those worries and fears and insecurities in right now. It’s not the time for them. 

“Hey, Mac, I hope you guys are wrapping things up, cause Mom’s got dinn…” She almost drops the phone at the sound of choking sobs from the other end of the line. “Mac? Mac? What’s wrong?”

* * *

BACK AT THE HOSPITAL

THIS IS BECOMING AN UNFORTUNATE CHRISTMAS TRADITION

Bozer really hates Christmas hospital vigils. The only thing different this time is that Sam Cage is one of the ones in the waiting room instead of the one in the OR. She flew all the way down from the Cabin with Eileen, who’s been dropped off at Phoenix since apparently she’s not quite trusted enough to be allowed in a public space. 

Bozer would get up and talk to Cage, ask her how things are going to try and get his mind off things, but all he can think about is the way Jack’s hand felt in his own the second before the man let go. _ It’s my fault. I let him fall. _ Bozer knows, logically, that it was Jack’s choice to let go. That if he’d held on, Bozer would have been pulled over the cliff with him. 

But that doesn’t make the hard ball of guilt in his chest any smaller. Especially when he sees Mac’s tear-stained face and red eyes, or Riley surrounded by Diane and Abina, both of them holding her close as she sniffles. _ If Jack dies, and it’s my fault, it would serve me right if Mac never talked to me again. _

He can’t look at any of them. Not when all of them know what happened out there. Know that Jack is laying in there in a hospital bed because of Bozer. 

He gets up from the row of waiting chairs and sits down at a table, but he can’t distance himself from the guilty thoughts. He watches doctors and nurses come and go. And he looks up when he hears a familiar voice. It’s Jill, her scars almost concealed by a buffalo plaid scarf wrapped around her throat. She’s carrying a large paper bag from a deli, and a larger tray of coffees. 

“I thought you all might want this.” She hands around sandwiches and coffees, setting Bozer’s on the table in front of him. He ignores both, staring at his hands.

“Bozer…” Jill says.

“I can’t eat.”

“You’ve been out of the country for over thirty-six hours, when was the last time you had more than a cup of coffee or a granola bar?” Jill asks. “Probably on the Phoenix jet, am I right?”

“I can’t eat.”

Jill sighs, and moves away to put her hand on Mac’s shoulder. Bozer lowers his head to the table on his folded hands. 

He hears a chair grate across the linoleum and looks up to see Leanna sitting down across from him. She picks up the sandwich and the coffee. 

“They’re hot,” She says with a weak smile. “Don’t let it get cold, it won’t be half as good.”

“Leanna, I can’t.”

“Bozer. It wasn’t your fault,” Leanna says.

“You saw the report, right?” She nods. “So you know that’s not true.” He chokes on a bitter sob. “I should have known he’d try to let go. I should have been holding more than his hand.” He can’t shake the mental image of Jack plummeting downward into the icy abyss, like freaking Bucky Barnes. _ I’ll never be able to watch that movie again. _

“Bozer. If you’d held on, both of you would have fallen, and Mac would have been alone to face all four of those guys.”

“For all the good I did.” Bozer mutters, looking at his bandaged arm, and glancing quickly away from Mac’s bruised face. 

“You helped keep him alive until tac teams showed up.” Leanna pushes the cup of coffee toward Bozer again. “Here. You’re shaking.”

“I’m not cold.” He hasn’t been cold for a while now, not since he and Mac and Jack were airlifted. 

The hospital doors swing open, and a nurse steps out. “You’re the family of Jack Dalton, correct?” She asks, glancing at the row of concerned faces in the chairs.

Mac nods. “How is he?”

“Well, thanks to a landing in deep drifted snow, Agent Dalton has only some minor bruising and small contusions. However, he hit his head against the rockface during the fall, it appears. He’s still in a coma, and brain scans...it’s inconclusive. He could wake up, or he might never come out of it at all. We’ll keep testing, but there are no guarantees.”

“I understand.” Matty says. “I’ll notify his next of kin of the situation.” Bozer wonders what cover story she’ll spin for it, and then realizes he doesn’t actually care.

“Can we...can we see him?” Riley’s voice is choked. 

“Yes. He’s stable, in a room in intensive care. I’d advise only a few visitors at a time, two at most, in case something goes wrong and a response team needs the space to work.” Bozer shudders at the implication. 

Mac stumbles to his feet, and Bozer expects Riley to follow. After all, those two are the ones closest to Jack, the ones he treats like they’re his own flesh and blood. But Riley gives Mac a small nod instead, and he walks over to Bozer, resting a hand on Boze’s shoulder.

“You want to come see him?”

Bozer almost says no. But he can’t bring himself to do it. If he doesn’t go in there with Mac, he’ll just keep seeing Jack falling into nothingness every time he closes his eyes. Not that seeing the man in a hospital bed is much more reassuring, but it’s something. 

Jack looks small in the bed, surrounded by blinking monitors and wires and tubes. It’s wrong. Jack isn’t supposed to look like that. He’s supposed to be strong and laughing and alive, not barely breathing and laying on his back in a hospital. 

Bozer blinks back the haze in his eyes, watching as Mac sits down in a chair by the bed. Mac swallows hard, wrapping his own trembling fingers through Jack’s still ones. “Wake up, Jack, please, wake up.” 

* * *

TEXAS

JACK ALWAYS FIGURED THIS WOULD BE HIS HEAVEN

Jack frowns, glancing around at the familiar house and barns, feeling the desert wind on his face, breathing in the smell of mesquite and sand. This is the ranch. How did he get here?

The last thing he remembers is tumbling over a Canadian cliff. Thousands of miles from Texas. _ Am I dead? _It sort of makes sense. And ending up in Texas for eternity doesn’t seem like a bad way to spend it, it’s how he hoped it would be. 

He jumps at the bang of a house door. _ That’s Momma. But she’s not dead...right? _ And then he sees more and more of his family. Cody, Matt and Amy, Uncle Joey... There are familiar cars in the driveway, now that he’s aware they’re there...although he doesn’t remember seeing them a second ago, he thought it was just him and the tumbleweeds. The people getting out of those cars are ones he recognizes. It’s the Dalton family Christmas. _ Did I get some kind of amnesia, that I don’t remember anything after the accident until now? _

He grins and starts up the steps. They don’t creak under his feet the way he remembers. He reaches for Momma but she looks right through him, and he pulls back, avoiding wrapping his arms around her. _ She can’t see me? _ He swallows a worried lump in his throat. This isn’t right. Maybe he’s dreaming. Maybe he’s a damn ghost. He walks in through the door with a cousin, maybe he can walk through walls now but he’s not going to test it. 

There are no pictures of him in the house. The rest of his family is here, photographs of his sister, his cousins, his parents. He knows those photos, they’re familiar. He remembers the places they were taken. But it’s like he’s been erased from all of them. He’s not just dead, or a ghost. He never existed here. 

_ Like in “Back to the Future” when Marty just fades out of the photo. It’s like I was never born, never part of the family. What is this? I have to be dreaming, right? _

He bangs his toe into the doorjamb on purpose, but aside from a sharp pain and a muffled curse, nothing changes. _ Well, I can’t walk through walls. And apparently, I’m not asleep. _

Wherever he’s woken up, it’s a world in which Jack Dalton doesn’t exist. 

He stumbles back outside, past the cheerful chatter in the living room and the warm good smells drifting out of the kitchen. He feels drunk, or more accurately like he’s been stabbed. He wants to go to the barn. That’s where he’s always gone when he can’t think, when the ghosts and demons of his past attack with claws and teeth and shrapnel and desert sand. 

The door creaks open under his hand, and he steps inside, into the warmth and sweet hay odor of the barn. The horses whicker and stamp, maybe they can feel his presence. He steps into one of the stalls, the one where Winchester is stabled. His chestnut is more swaybacked this year, but the horse is so familiar. Jack rests his face in the coarse mane, reaching into his pocket out of habit to see if there’s a treat for the gelding. 

There’s a weight in his pocket. Jack pulls it out, an old-fashioned compass. _ That’s strange. I know I wasn’t carrying anything like this. _

And then the world starts spinning, copper and tan and black and gold...and Jack falls backward into nothingness. 

* * *

SOMEWHERE IN JAKARTA

Jack recognizes this place. He’s run a few ops in Jakarta in his CIA days, they’ve had a finger on the pulse of a major smuggling operation there. They’re working around the edges, last he knew, letting the smugglers stay free so that they can lead CIA teams to the terrorists, arms dealers, drug lords, and mercs who use the organization to funnel their merchandise. 

But he hasn’t been here in a long time. Not since the CIA years. So he isn’t totally sure what he’s doing here now. _ Some kind of ‘ghost of Christmas past” deal? _ He honestly can’t remember if he _ was _ in Jakarta over a Christmas. 

He turns slowly in a circle, watching the people around him, trying to see if he can see himself. _ If I can then I’m officially living in a Charles Dickens novel. _

He doesn’t see himself, but he does see someone he knows. He recognizes that curly hair, and that stride. It’s Riley. And he knows her well enough to see that she’s limping and trying to hide it. _ She was never in Jakarta with me. What is this? _

He follows her through the streets. He can’t talk to her out here, risk blowing whatever cover she’s come under. Even though it doesn’t seem like anyone acknowledges his presence. Even for the hurried shuffle and bustle of a city street, he’s been run into a lot, and no one yet has apologized. At all. In any way. No one has even looked at him. 

Riley begins to walk faster. Maybe she’s sensing she’s being followed, Jack knows that the paranoia that builds up after time in the field can make you see ghosts. Maybe she can actually see him, but doesn’t really know who he is. He starts to walk faster, and suddenly the street seems to blur, like he’s seeing it through heavy rain, and it shifts under his feet and he’s looking at it out the grimy window of a shitty little hotel room. _ Wait, what happened? _

A box fan chatters loudly in a corner, the walls are covered in peeling greenish paint, and a collection of flies buzz in the corners of the window, probably seeking the neon glow coming in from the street outside, that illuminates the room in a mixture of purple, teal, and pink. The bed tucked in one corner is covered with a grimy wool blanket that might have been cream once but is now dirty-edged and spattered with questionable stains. Jack’s familiar with rooms like this. He’s spent plenty of ops in them. It’s just like a thousand others, and he has no idea if he’s ever personally been in this particular one. 

He’s about to walk around and look to see if there’s anything in here that gives him a clue to what’s happening, when he hears the familiar cadence of Riley’s steps again. They’re coming down the hall, and then there’s a soft thump as they stop outside the door, and the scrape of a key in the lock. 

Jack doesn’t particularly want to get shot, in case Riley can see him, or even sort of see him. He ducks behind a cracked wicker screen in a corner that seems to be the answer to a closet, and watches, trying to gauge when it’s safe to make himself known.

Riley limps in, gun drawn, scanning the room for safety. But Jack watches in shock and horror as blood drips from the fingers of the hand clutching the gun grip in white-knuckled fingers. Jack stands up. He’s not going to let her bleed out and do nothing to help. “Riley? Agent Davis?” She doesn’t even glance his way. He watches in horror as her eyes seem to look right through him as she continues checking the room. She even glances behind the screen, so close Jack could have touched her hand if he’d moved. But she doesn’t see him at all. 

Riley locks the door behind her, lays her gun on the nightstand, and pulls up the edge of her shirt to reveal a deep, bleeding gash across her side.

She yanks a duffel bag out from under the bed, rummaging through it until she pulls out a first aid kit, one of the heavily stocked CIA ones. She bites the cap off a syringe that Jack recognizes as a numbing agent and injects it near the wound, then scrubs her hands with cleaner, pulling out a bottle of disinfectant and one of distilled water. She sits on the edge of the sink, hair pulled back so it won’t fall in her eyes, cleaning out the wound, and then reaches for the packet for stitches. 

Jack grimaces. Even with the numbing agent, this is going to hurt. And he’s well aware Riley has a high tolerance for the medication in standard CIA kits. Just like for dental novocaine.

She threads the needle carefully, in the flickery light of the single bare bulb over the sink, and then grits her teeth and starts stitching.

Jack is well attuned to the tiny indicators of his girl in pain. He can see the fluttering pulse, the clenched jaw, the muscle in her neck that jumps every time the needle goes in. He wants to take the needle from her hands, to do this for her, to hold on tight to her hand as she rides out the pain. But he can’t do that. She can’t see him. 

“Riley?” She clearly can’t hear him. But he can hear every muffled curse and pained hiss that forces its way past her gritted teeth. He’s forced to watch helplessly until it’s over, and she painstakingly washes her hands, sterilizes her needle, and wraps the wound. She sits back down on the bed, and from the slumped posture and half-lidded eyes, Jack can tell she’s about to fall asleep right there. And then she jumps and goes rigid, body suddenly tense. 

Jack can tell her comms must have come online, from the way she glances up and to the side while talking, as if she’s trying to see who’s speaking into her ear. 

“My cover’s intact.” Riley glances from the bandages on her side to the gun on the table. “Unfortunately, I’m going to need a good story for why my informant is no longer available. Or I’ll probably follow him.” 

_ She sounds too much like me. _ This Riley has had to be herself and her own Jack for too long. He can hear it in her voice. The fact that she killed a man doesn’t faze her in the slightest. If the injury is any indication, it was self defense. But the Riley he knows comes over to see him after every one of those times, to sit on a couch with a cold beer and a silent reassurance that she’s not a bad person for doing what has to be done. 

“He flipped on me. Confronted me in an alley with two more of their guys. He was going to take me to his boss, see if he could get a promotion for ferreting out the mole. All he got was a quick trip to the bottom of the bay.”

Whatever is said from the other end draws a muffled curse and a frustrated frown. 

“I can finish it.” She whispers, flopping back onto the dirty mattress. “Not like I really have a choice, do I?” The acid bitterness in her voice is a Riley who Jack hasn’t heard for years. It’s the Riley he first met all those years ago, volatile and friendless and angry. _ And without me, she stayed like that? _

Whatever’s said over comms must really piss her off, because she yanks the earbud out, tosses it on the table, and rolls over on her bed. In a few minutes, her breathing softens and her body relaxes slightly. She’s asleep.

Jack creeps out of his hiding space, trying not to collide with anything in the tiny room, or cause the rickety floorboards to creak. But the still-buzzing fan hides any tiny creaks and scrapes. Jack walks up to the bed, resting his hand over Riley’s head, just enough to feel the humidity-frizzled curls. He studies the grimy cheeks, the thin hand, with its bloodstained fingernails, wrapped around the gun now tucked under her pillow, and has to turn away so that his tear falls on the floor and not on her face. 

_ Oh baby girl. What’s happened to you? _

* * *

HOSPITAL ROOM

DEFINITELY NOT THE PLACE ANYONE WANTS TO SPEND CHRISTMAS

Riley lets a hand hover over Mac’s shoulder. He’s sleeping now, a restless thrashing sort of slumber, but she hasn’t the heart to wake him. He needs sleep. With Jack so badly hurt, Mac won’t rest until he passes out. And she can’t deal with both of them ill. She can’t.

Jack looks wrong, pale against the pillows, with bandages wrapped around his head. She’s gotten sadly used to seeing Mac in a hospital gown, his pale face and messy blond hair against the pillows, his face bruised or cut or slack with unconsciousness, or sweaty with fever. 

It’s not that she hasn’t seen Jack injured too. But it just seems more terrifying to see him beaten down. Jack is supposed to be their rock. The one they can rely on. 

“Please, don’t leave us,” Riley whispers. “Come back.” She rests her head on the pillow beside Jack’s slack, pale face, and begins humming softly. 

“I want a hippopotamus for Christmas, only a hippopotamus will do…” She swallows. “Come on, this is the part where you totally ruin it by launching into half of “Gee, I Wish I Was Back in the Army” from _ White Christmas, _ remember? ‘Three meals a day, for which you didn’t pay…’” But Jack’s voice is painfully silent. 

“I wish I was telling you to stop butchering songs and making my ears hurt by singing them off key right now.” Riley blinks. “It hurts more when you’re quiet, you know that?”

Jack doesn’t answer at all. 

Riley sighs. She needs to get up and walk around. If she keeps looking at Jack here in the bed, she’ll break down sobbing and be unable to contain it. 

She leaves Mac still asleep, choosing not to comment on the fact that she saw his red-rimmed eyes flicker open once, or that he put his head down on his arms again quickly to hide the tears, or that his shoulders are still shaking with soundless sobs. He doesn’t want comfort from any of them right now. He wants Jack to hold him, and anyone else is just going to be a reminder of the wrongness. Or at least that’s how Riley feels. 

She’s pacing the hall when she hears the footsteps behind her. She turns around slowly. It’s Matty. And just like that, Riley crumbles. She sinks to her knees and lets Matty wrap her arms around her, no words needed. 

“Riley?” There’s so much softness and kindness in Matty’s voice. Just as if Riley never yelled at her a week ago, just as if there was never any rift between them. And Riley shatters. She might lose Jack. She can’t let herself lose Matty too.

“Matty, I’m so sorry.” She can’t stop the tears but she doesn’t want to and she doesn’t care. No one is dry eyed in here tonight. “I...I let myself feel slighted and wronged when you’ve never been anything but good to me.” 

Matty’s voice is gentle, as is her hand in Riley’s tangled hair. “I love you like a daughter, Riley Davis. From the moment I met you, I knew I would. And everything I have done is because of that. You can believe that or not, but that is the truth.” 

“I’m sorry I ever doubted that.” Riley whispers.

“I came to tell you Elwood is on his way. He heard what happened and he insisted on coming right away to be here for you. And Billy’s texting me, worried about you. He’s talking about booking the next flight out here.”

“Oh god. I let my phone die.” She follows Matty into the waiting room. Diane’s not there, probably sitting in with Jack herself. Riley’s seen her twisting the place on her finger where a ring should be. _ They’ve both kept dancing around their feelings all this time, and now it might be too late for them to ever find out what might have been. _ She swallows a hitched sob, and Abina and Mac, who’ve been sitting together taking apart an ipod that someone must have donated to the cause of distracting them, both stand up and pull Riley into a hug.

The door opens, and Riley hears Elwood’s voice. And despite the fact that he hasn’t been her father for a long time, that the man in there in the hospital bed fills that role now, she still accepts his comfort. He cares about her enough to come comfort her when the person who helped her move on from him for good is the one injured. That’s a lot of growth for the Elwood Riley remembers, and in the middle of everything, she feels her heart thaw toward him a little more. 

Eventually Diane comes back, and offers to go get them all hot chocolate from the Starbucks in the lobby. When she returns, Riley nurses her cup in her hands, sitting next to Abina and Diane. They’re being so kind. Even Elwood’s hug feels genuine. But it’s all incomplete without Jack Dalton’s warm hands on her shoulders, and the smell of gunpowder and leather when she buries her face in his shirt. _ I need Jack. I’m lost without him. _

* * *

CIA HEADQUARTERS

THAT MAGIC COMPASS DOOHICKEY IS KIND OF AWESOME

Jack barely touched the compass in his pocket, reaching in to see if there was anything that might be able to help Riley. Instantly, the sleazy Jakarta hotel vanished, and he found himself on the front steps of an all too familiar building. 

It’s just sunset in Langley, Virgina, and Jack walks through the doors uncontested with several members of the night shift. If there was any doubt he can’t be seen, this confirms it. CIA security would never let someone without an ID past them.

He manages to glance at the clock in the lobby when he goes past it, noting that it reads, below the time, the date. December 24, 2018. So he’s in his own year, at least. Not in the past, where he thought he might be. 

He makes his way to the office that’s the one reason he can think of for the compass bringing him here. It seems to be taking him to see people he knows, how they’re existing in this altered world without him. 

When he finds the office, he opens the frosted glass door, glances inside, and feels his heart twist. Because the Matilda Webber sitting in that chair is one he saw for the first time a week ago. This is Matty defeated, broken, lost, and utterly adrift. He hated seeing it for a few days during their rescue of Ethan and the aftermath. And it looks like here, that’s what her life has become an endless round of. 

Matty’s face looks drawn, exhausted. There are silvered streaks in her black hair. _ So she can’t actually blame me for giving her grey hairs. She got them even without me around. _ He almost laughs at the thought.

Someone smashes into him from behind. Or, more accurately, walks right _ through _him, albeit with a bit of a shudder. It’s a secretary, holding a stack of papers and a phone. 

“Webber, we just heard from Davis. She’s injured, but she’s insisting on completing the objective.” 

“Of course she is.” Matty sighs. “Let her do it. I don’t want her pissed off and with something to prove halfway across the globe. She knows when to call it quits. Or she should.” She sighs. “I wanted to oversee her op personally, this time, but…” Her desk is covered in paperwork, and her desk phone’s voicemail is blinking insistently. “Tell Jenkins to go easy on her. It’s the first Christmas without her mom, after all.” _ Oh God, what happened to Diane? _ Jack tries to sort through his memory of anything that could have occurred over the past year, but he thinks both times Diane was in immediate danger were due to him. _ But she moved to LA to be with Riley. Maybe something happened in Portland, and because she never left there, cause Riley never went to Phoenix, she died. _

He takes a shaky breath, listening as the secretary gives the rest of the evening’s debrief and several thick sheaves of papers to Matty. 

“Oh, and I was told to inform you, ma’am, that Dragonfly can be officially closed. We received word from our Balkan contacts an hour ago that our former UC has been terminated.” Jack frowns. _ What...that’s about Ethan, right? _ “It appears that he had some sort of dead man protocol on his computer, and it sent a massive file dump to our offices. He’d been stockpiling information on S-Company for years. We’re still sorting through the details, but it appears that Reigns was acting under a deep cover plan these past eight years.” 

“Thank you, Marissa.” Matty’s voice is choked and hoarse. 

After the woman walks away, Matty gets up and closes her door. She looks at the calendar on her wall, and the clock on her desk, and the half-finished mug of coffee by her chair. And then she walks over to a bookshelf and picks up something that was lying there. A photo in a frame, set facedown. Matty slowly turns it upright, tracing a finger down the glass as tears trickle down her cheeks.

“I’m so sorry.” Matty whispers, setting the photo down. “I should have known.” Jack glances at the picture. It’s her and Ethan. 

_ If I wasn’t here, he and his family would have died? _ Jack shivers at the thought of the innocent wife and daughter in the hands of S-Company’s mercs. He swallows a choked gasp. _ How many people are dead because I’ve never existed here? _

His heart leaps into his throat at the thought. Because he knows who he hasn’t seen yet. Mac. 

_ Come on, compass, take me to Phoenix. _

* * *

Matty walks into Jack’s hospital room. There’s only one other person in here right now, Sam Cage. She’s sitting in a chair in a corner, arms folded. Anyone else would think she was showing a complete and utter lack of emotion. But Matty knows better. Sam’s holding vigil, waiting for Jack to wake up, the way she’d wait for him to call in that the mission was complete after things went to hell in the last eight seconds. 

She raises an eyebrow when Matty comes in, and stands up. “I should get back out to the waiting room. Leaving Eileen alone for too long is making me jittery.” Matty nods. She knows Cage is only making this excuse to give Matty some time alone with Jack, because Eileen is currently sitting in a holding room at Phoenix. “Have you contacted his next of kin?”

Matty sighs. “His mom’s on her way up. So are most of the rest of his family.” She swallows hard. Notices like this are the worst part of her job. She’s feared for a long time that she’d have to give Jack’s. _ He’s not dead, but this is almost worse. We have no idea what will happen now. _

“And you’ve given them a cover story?”

Matty nods. The best she could do was car accident. It’s more believable and raises less questions than just about anything else, especially this time of year with the insanely chaotic holiday traffic. 

“If you need anything, Matty…”

She just nods. 

Cage walks out, and Matty sits down beside Jack’s bed. 

“Dalton, I swear to God if you don’t wake up soon I will drag you out of this coma myself so I can kick your ass.” She shakes her head. “All of us are counting on you, you know. Whose phone will Mac take apart if you die? Who will Riley yell at about singing off key? Who’s going to hand me messy reports with _ Die Hard _references?” She sighs, sitting down and grabbing Jack’s hand tightly. “You know I only give you grief because you’re one of my oldest and dearest friends.”

Jack, true to stubborn form, doesn’t move.

Matty sighs, and looks out the window. The first tint of dawn is showing in the sky. It’s Christmas Day and they’re in sore need of a miracle. In books, and movies, this is always when the coma patient wakes up. But if there’s one thing Matty’s learned, it’s that life isn’t anything like those.

She doesn’t know how much more loss she can deal with. Ethan was a bitter, heavy blow that she’s still reeling from. Because even if she cut ties with him a long time ago, she’d been starting to hope. After the team found Dragonfly. After she’d found out Ethan hadn’t betrayed his country. And then she’d learned that he’d betrayed _ her. _

She’s grateful that domino effect didn’t cost her Mac and Riley. But she’s afraid that losing Jack will. _ Will they be able to set foot in Phoenix again without being overwhelmed by their memories of him? _ Jack Dalton’s been with Phoenix (and previously DXS) since the agency was overhauled and Thornton joined. He’s a fixture of the place, every inch of it, especially now, carries some of him in it, in the memories. Matty can’t imagine the War Room without Jack’s larger than life presence. And if that’s her experience, she can’t imagine how Mac and Riley and Bozer will feel. _ Losing Jack might mean losing all of them. _

The door opens, and she looks up. Thornton, in a red dress with her hair falling out of a neat bun, is standing there. 

“I came as soon as I could manage to get the Shanghai op squared away.” Matty nods. They had a team on the ground there thwarting a massive cyberattack. It’s no wonder Patty looks exhausted. She’s been managing that mission and worrying about Jack’s status. Matty knows for a fact that getting status reports from secretaries doesn’t cut it when someone you care about is in critical condition. 

“Jack,” Patty says, staring down at the bed. “You better wake up. You owe me a mission report.” Matty doesn’t comment on the fact that she can see tears in the woman’s eyes. _ Neither of us want to admit how much we care. Not even when he’s not awake to hear us. _It’s just force of habit, these scoldings that mean they care. 

Thornton sits down beside Matty. “I can’t stay long, but…”

“But you had to see him.” Matty nods. “I know.”

“Jack’s a pain in the ass but I...I don’t know how I could stay here without knowing he was here too.” Patty says. She rests her hand on Jack’s scarred, still one. “Jack’s probably the only one keeping me sane. Those ridiculous reports, his stupid jokes, the way he treats missions like he’s having the time of his life…” She shakes her head. “He reminds me that there’s more to life than the next mission, than the stress and worry and fear.” 

Matty nods. “I thought it would drive me insane, but you’re right. Without Jack...there wasn’t all that much light in this world we live in.” She sighs. “Jack keeps us all from losing ourselves to the darkness.” _ Because he’s come closer to it than any of us. And he knows what it takes to stop himself. To keep the darkness at bay. _

“I don’t know what we’ll do if he’s gone.” Matty knows that alone, she and Patty don’t have Jack’s same skill for keeping everyone on the right side of the razor edge of sanity. She knows that without Jack, Mac and Riley will both spiral. That the darkness in them needs Jack to help them hold it back, at least for now. _ They’re both so young. They need his experience, his knowledge, to grow into the people they can become. _

Patty rubs a hand over her face, and in the harsh fluorescent lighting, Matty can see all the lines etched in it. The marks of a life lived looking over her shoulder, watching everyone else’s backs, and watching all too many of the people she’s taken responsibility for walk out those doors and never come back. 

She turns and looks at Matty. “I have to go. Tell me when he wakes up.”

_ When. Not if. _And Matty has a feeling that one little word is the biggest act of faith. 

* * *

DXS OFFICES

JACK DOESN’T LIKE THE TWILIGHT ZONE VERSION OF THEM

There’s no Mac anywhere to be seen. Not in the labs, not in the tactical rooms. Not in the personnel files when Jack sneaks a peek at them behind a beleaguered secretary’s back. 

He does catch a glimpse of Walsh in Oversight’s office, and remembers he hasn’t seen Patty around here at all. _ In this world, did she never join DXS? Or...did Walsh kill her the way he planned to when she discovered his secret? _ The thought that the Organization is still alive and well in this world is terrifying. 

But what bothers him more is that there’s no sign of Mac. Riley is accounted for. Maybe not doing all that well, but she’s here, in this world. And Mac should be. _ He’s not my biological son, so my existence or lack thereof shouldn’t affect him, right? _ Mac would probably know more about that, he’s always going off on the scientific ramifications of weird theoretical things like the existence of a multiverse. _ And he constantly nitpicks the time travel in Back to the Future, which is borderline heresy, but I forgive him, cause he’s probably right. _

But there is no Mac around to ask. Jack has the sudden horrible thought that maybe more than just his existence has changed in this world. Maybe James never left. Maybe he’s been forcing Mac to do unspeakable things, tearing the kid’s good heart to shreds along the way. Maybe Jack doesn’t want to see what version of Mac exists here. 

But he can’t keep telling himself that. He has to know. He has to. 

He touches the compass, picturing Mac in his mind. This time, there’s a buzzing, jerking feeling, like it can’t get a reading. _ Maybe I need to think of a place, not a person. _ He’s not really sure how to work this thing at all. But to get a place, he has to know where Mac is, and that could be problematic if the kid’s still a vigilante, or with his father. And Jack hates the idea of Mac still being in the place where he knows the kid was a few years ago. Mac spent too many Christmases in prison already. 

His phone still gets internet, and he searches Mac’s name. The first thing he gets is a string of articles about his arrest as a domestic terrorist. _ So that still happened here. But there was no us to get him a release, I didn’t know Charlie who was able to prove him innocent, in this world he didn’t even have a chance. _ The thought that maybe his kid is still in prison is horrifying. _ No one here can see me. Maybe I can slip inside and find a way to help him? _ Clearly he can affect things in the world around him, like picking up the files. Maybe he can break the kid out… _ That’s crazy. But so is waking up in a world where you never existed. _

At least he knows where Mac is. California Correctional. He touches the compass again, and again it jiggles, wobbles frantically, and then dumps him not inside or outside the walls of a prison, but in the doorway of a diner. 

_ Why would this thing send me to Tony’s? _

* * *

Mac can’t bear it any longer. He can’t sit there and watch Jack breathing only with the help of a machine, and not lose it completely in front of his whole team. It’s wrong, and it shouldn’t have happened, and he can’t lose Jack. He can’t. Nothing in the whole world makes sense if Jack is gone. 

He stumbles downstairs, and outside into a small courtyard garden. There’s a plaque in one of the flowerbeds, probably a notation of whose memory it’s been established in. He sits down on a small bench. It’s more child-sized than adult, but Mac doesn’t care. He leans over, resting his head on his hands. 

_ I need Jack back. I need him. Please, I’ve lost so much. Please. Not Jack. _

“This seat taken, son?” A deep voice that reminds Mac of a movie Santa Claus asks.

He doesn’t look up, just, shaking his head. “Not really. You can sit down if you want.”

“I think I’ll take you up on that. I’ve got something I’d like to do.” The man sits down with a soft groan. “Ahhh. Not as young as I used to be.” Mac turns and glances at the man, half expecting to see an actual Santa Claus. He’ll know he’s officially lost it if he does. 

The man on the bench is no Santa Claus. Instead of a thick beard, his face is shaved, and he’s almost totally bald. What hair is left is a greying tan. But there’s a jovial kindness to him as he shuffles himself into a comfortable seat on the bench beside Mac. And immediately, every pigeon and squirrel in the vicinity flocks to him.

The man pulls handfuls of nuts and seeds from pockets of his long grey trench coat. He hands Mac a handful of the seeds. “Hold out your hand, son. They won’t bite. Well, they’ll only bite the seeds.” He laughs. 

Mac hesitantly holds out his hand, and immediately his arm is mobbed by several pigeons, in all shades, even a white one that glances at him with a soft coo before pecking at the grain in his hand. The onslaught startles him, and he jumps, closing his fingers. He’s rewarded with an indignant peck from a slate-grey bird. 

“You need to open your hand,” the man says with a small smile. 

Mac nods and does so, and the birds eat ravenously. For a moment, the cooing and the flutter of wings distracts him from the thoughts flapping around his head like a flock of birds. But just as quickly, they settle in again, and he frowns.

“That’s a long face for someone who’s got an armful of birds worthy of a Disney princess,” The man says. “What’s wrong, son?”

“My...my dad. He’s in a coma and they...they don’t know if he’s going to wake up.” Mac wonders how old this man is going to think he is. He feels five again, listening helplessly to the voices telling him his mother is never coming home. 

“I’m so sorry. No one should have to spend Christmas watching someone they love suffer.” The man rests a heavy, warm hand on Mac’s shoulder, and surprisingly, Mac finds himself sinking into the comfort rather than flinching away. Somehow he knows the last thing this man wants to do is hurt him. “But keep on hoping. You know, most miracles happen when we’ve come to the end of all we can do, and let go and trust.”

Mac feels tears burning in the corners of his eyes. “It’s hard to trust when life keeps taking everything away.”

The warm hand trembles. “I know, son, I know. It’s hard to see the light some days. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t there. And hope isn’t lost. Not yet.”

“Who are you?” Mac asks.

The man shrugs. “Well, most folks just call me Pete.” _ Funny, I fully expected him to say Nick. Or Chris. Or something like a real life Santa Claus would be called in one of those cheesy Hallmark movies. _ He’s seen enough of them playing on the waiting room TV. _ It seems almost cruel to do that. To keep repeating all those happy endings in the faces of people who probably won’t get their own. _It hurts too much to hope, at times like this. 

“And you just saw me sitting out here and decided to talk?”

“Well, you looked like you needed someone to keep you from falling right off that ledge you were on. But that’s not the only reason I’m here, of course. I flew into town to see my daughter for the holidays. I was told she was here.”

“I’m so sorry.” Mac says. _ Here I am feeling sorry for myself and he’s going through the same thing, except he’s watching his kid, which is arguably worse. _He pulls out a paperclip and starts shaping it into a Santa hat.

“She was only visiting someone,” Pete says. “Still, I think she cared about him very much. I’m going to stop by her office after this, just to see her for a few moments.”

“I’m sorry I’m keeping you.”

“Not at all. You know, I think she would be happy that I spent this time helping someone else smile a little. There’s someone she looks after, a kid she adopted, and I think he’s a lot like you. And I know she’d do anything to make him happy.” 

“She sounds really nice.” Mac sets down the hat and starts working on a sleigh. _ I haven’t...I haven’t folded a paperclip since Jack… _

Because he didn’t have any. He had used every single one on their mission, and then he couldn’t find any to steal at the hospital. The on duty nurse was frazzled and frustrated about spending the holiday away from her family, and he’d decided not to ask. _ How did these get in my pocket? _

Pete stands up. “Well, I’ve got to fly.” He brushes a few crumbs of seeds and some nut shells off his coat. “Come on inside, son, before you freeze out here.” 

It’s not really cold, but Mac _ is _ shaking. He stands up and follows the man, still fumbling with the paperclips in his pocket. There must be at least a dozen. _ How could I have missed them? _

Pete turns toward the doors, smiling. “Merry Christmas, son. And keep looking for the miracles.” 

Mac stares after the man. _ That’s impossible… _ But he didn’t have paperclips in his pockets before this man showed up, and then he did. _ How could he have known that’s what I needed? _

He rushes up to the front desk. Pete just walked by them, they had to have seen him. And he would have to have signed in to get inside the doors. This hospital even made Mac leave his knife with them before they let him into the visitors’ area. That’s the one saving grace of Phoenix medical, they don’t act like he’s going to cause a mass murder with his SAK. 

The receptionist is typing away on her computer, flanked by two enormous pots of poinsettias. Mac leans on the desk and rings the bell to get her attention. 

“The man who was in here in a grey coat, who was he?” Mac asks. “The one who just left.” 

“Grey coat?” The receptionist looks confused. “You’ll have to be more specific.”

“He was older. Like in his seventies. Almost bald, a little heavyset, grey trench coat.” 

The woman frowns. “It’s not ringing a bell. Let me check the tapes. When was he here?”

“Well, he could have come in any time, in the last few hours,” Mac says lamely. “But...but he did leave out the front doors. He walked me into the lobby, said goodbye, wished me a Merry Christmas, and then he walked out those doors.”

The woman frowns, glancing up from her computer. “That man? He signed in as a...” She glances at the screen again. "Peter Thornton."

_ NO _ _way. _

Mac looks out the door again. But the man is gone. Like he was never even here. _Guess that's where Patty gets it from._ And part of him wonders if the man knew who he was the whole time. If he's anything like his daughter, Mac will never find out. 

* * *

TONY’S BURGERS

JACK’S ONLY BEEN HERE ONCE

_ Damn compass must be broken. I asked to go to the prison, not here. _ Jack sighs. Maybe he can’t control the thing after all and it’s taking him where it wants to go. _ Where it wants...I am going crazy. _ Then again, he’s living in a world where he doesn’t exist.

The smell of frying burgers and sizzling bacon makes his stomach growl. He hasn’t eaten since he showed up here, wherever here is. He takes a few steps toward the counter, where a waitress is leaning over taking a child’s order in sign language, then remembers that no one in this world can see him. He can’t even order a meal.

Maybe he can snatch some fries off someone’s plate when they’re not looking. There’s a man at the counter who’s much too absorbed in whatever is on his phone. Jack figures he’s his best bet of stealing a mouthful or two. _ I might confuse him, but then again, I’m confused too, so who the hell cares? _

Jack sits down at the counter, then jerks his head up at the sound of a familiar voice. _ Boze? _ He grins in spite of himself. Bozer’s always happy. He’ll make this better. If there’s one person who isn’t falling apart this Christmas Eve, it must be Boze. 

“Sir, have you been helped yet?” Bozer asks, he must be taking over for the ASL girl. Jack frowns, glancing at the fries on the plate. _ I wonder if I can sneak that one hanging off the edge… _

“Sir? Uh, Meggie, can you come back, I think this guy might be deaf too?”

Jack looks up sharply. Bozer is staring right at him. _ What? He’s asking me? _

“Boze, you can see me?”

“Okay, first of all, what? Dude, are you high? Or too much eggnog?” Bozer asks. “Meg, forget it. He heard me. He’s just…” He frowns. “Wait.”

“Something wrong?” Jack asks. Maybe he’s flickering. Or fading in and out. Or just fading.

“Do I know you?” Bozer asks. _ Right. I called him Boze without thinking. _

“Um...nah.” Jack shrugs. “Your name’s on the tag, man.” 

“Oh. Right.” Bozer says. “Just...the way you said it...Only one person calls...called me Boze.” He’s stumbling over his words, and Jack only catches about half of them. _ Right. That’s Mac’s nickname for him...and as far as I can tell, in this world, Mac’s still in prison. _

“Guess it just seemed right.” Jack shrugs noncommittally. “Hey man, since you’re asking, I’ll take a bacon burger and a side of fries. And a soda. What kinds you got?” 

“Uh, Root beer, Ginger ale…”

“You know what, hand me a root beer.” Jack says. “Thanks, man.” Bozer rings up his order, and brings it out to him when it’s finished. Jack eats in silence, watching the other customers come and go. He watches the clock tick on, closer and closer to midnight. _ Maybe at midnight the world will go back to normal. _

At eleven Meg goes out and turns the shop’s sign around, to a taped on paper that says “Closing for Christmas, no more orders please.” Bozer shuts down the grills in the back. The last patrons finish their meals, pay their bills, and walk out, the door bell tinkling cheerfully behind them.

Bozer comes out front with a cart and a rag to start bussing tables, but Jack hears someone clear his throat behind him. There’s a guy standing behind the counter that Jack thinks is Tony. 

“Hey, Bozer. I’ll close up for you,” the man behind the counter says gently. “You go on and say Merry Christmas to them for me, will ya?”

“Yeah, Tony.” Bozer looks at Jack. “You’re still here?”

“Yeah, I am, I just said I’d close up for ya,” Tony says. “See, I got the plates.” He whisks Jack’s empty one out from under his hands. _ He can’t see me. _

“Oh...okay,” Bozer says weakly, and walks out. Jack throws a twenty from his wallet on the counter as he follows. _ Hope that’ll be visible, and that Tony’ll chalk it up to some kinda Christmas miracle, money appearing outta nowhere. _

Bozer’s unlocking his little teal car when Jack walks up to him. “Hey man, can a fella bum a ride?”

Bozer turns around with a shriek. “Get back! I have mace!” He shouts. Jack shakes his head. Pre-spy Bozer was a riot. 

“Listen, man. I’m not high. Or drunk. I’m just...down on my luck. Like, bad. No one cares one way or the other if I were to just stop existing altogether. You’re the first person to say hi to me today.” It’s the truth. Sort of.

“Okay. Oh man. Get in the car, get in the car. I’ll do whatever I gotta do to make sure you don’t throw yourself off a bridge tonight, I will. You can come home with me for Christmas, it’s just me and my sis but it’s family ya know?” Bozer’s talking a mile a minute. “Trust me, man, please, you’re important. You are. What’s your name?” 

“George.” Jack blurts out. It’s the first name that popped into his head. 

“Okay, George, I swear, at least one person now cares if you just disappear.” Bozer says. He pulls out into the late night LA traffic. “I just gotta make a couple stops first. Pretty depressing, you can stay in the car, but I promised them. So I gotta.” He sniffs. “Sorry, don’t mean to be a downer. You don’t need that.”

“Nah, man, I get it. Holidays are rough.” Jack’s not sure exactly what’s going on, but if Mac was a vigilante, then Jerry’s probably still dead. _ Losing your little brother...I can’t imagine how that taints the holidays. _

Bozer pulls the car into a cemetery. “Say, George, I just got some people to say Merry Christmas to, alright? You can wait here. Cemetery probably isn’t a great place for you to be right now, right?”

“Nah, I’m good.” Jack pretends to lean back in the seat and close his eyes, but the second Bozer’s out of hearing, he opens his door and follows him. 

Bozer walks down a couple lanes of headstones before kneeling down in front of a little grey one with a guitar and musical notes carved over a name. 

**Jeremiah Bozer**

**June 6, 1994-February 12, 2010**

“Hey, little bro,” Bozer says quietly. “I still hung that monstrosity of a sheep on the tree for you. Even though you bit his leg off all those years ago and we never found it.” He chuckles sadly. “You know you’re the reason we stopped making cookie ornaments.”

Jack chuckles in spite of himself. He wonders if his world’s Bozer visits his brother’s grave at Christmas. _ I never knew. Then again, we’ve been wreckin’ his Christmases since I’ve known him. _Poor guy hasn’t had a normal one in three years. 

Bozer stands up, wiping off the knees of his pants. 

_ Okay, he said goodbye to Jerry. Who’s he going to see now? _ Bozer isn’t leaving the row of stones. He’s just walking over to the next headstone and kneeling down again. _ Oh God. His mom? _Jack doesn’t remember when she died in his world, and he can’t begin to know whether the same is true here. 

“Hey. Listen, I made it here. Like I promised. So you didn’t have to be alone this year for Christmas. I’m so sorry you were ever alone. It’s not fair.” Jack hears a soft sob. “It’s my fault. It’s my fault.” 

This time Jack hears the faint click of something metal being placed on the headstone. His heart twists. _ No, no, no. _

He stumbles forward, he can’t pretend he’s not here any longer. Especially when Bozer turns around, with a startled jump, and Jack catches a clear glimpse of the name on the stone in front of him.

**Angus MacGyver **

**March 23, 1993-December 14, 2016**

There’s a poor attempt at a paperclip Christmas tree on top of the headstone.

_ Oh God. A few months after we should have gotten him out of there. _It hits in an overwhelming wave of grief that threatens to drown him. 

Jack crumples to his knees in front of the stone. “No, no, please tell me this isn’t true.” He sobs, hot tears tracing down his cheeks. The wind is icy, wrong for LA even this time of year. He can feel snow biting his face and hands. It shouldn’t be snowing, but it is. The ground and the headstone are covered in white. 

“Did you know him?” Bozer asks, his face a mix of confusion and grief. 

“Yeah. Yeah, I did,” Jack says. He doesn’t care how mixed up and crazy anything he says sounds anymore. It doesn’t matter, because Mac is _ dead. _ Mac is dead and Jack can’t bring himself to care about anything else. 

_ Oh kid, what happened? _

He doesn’t really hear what Bozer says in response over the roaring in his ears. “What happened to him?”

“He killed himself,” Bozer says simply, bitterly, and Jack’s heart shatters like a fallen icicle. 

_ He didn’t have anyone who cared. No one to tell him he was worth anything. Everyone in there treated him like he wasn’t even human. _Jack rests his forehead on the cold stone, sobbing. 

“Officially, it was a cartel hit. But I know...knew...Mac. He wouldn’t have gone down without a fight. He could have gotten away. But he didn’t.” Bozer swallows hard. “Sorry, I won’t talk about it, I just…”

“I need to know.” Jack can hear the desperate hoarseness in his tone. _ Right, he thought _ I _ was suicidal. And Mac’s probably the reason he was risking so much to try and save me. He trusted a total stranger because he didn’t want someone else to die like Mac. _ The thought rips another sob from Jack’s raw, ruined throat. 

Bozer swallows. “I-I found out from a friend of his, a guy who got out a couple months later. He came to the diner, said Mac asked him to tell me the truth because he knew he was gonna die.” He looks down at the stone. “He got arrested because of me. He was a vigilante, trying to avenge my little brother. And then something went wrong and they said he killed someone, and I know Mac, he never would have meant to, but they said he was a terrorist and gave him life in a supermax.” The words are spilling out faster than Jack can follow. But it doesn't matter, he knows the story. “He had been fighting the cartels, so they all wanted to kill him. Except some of them wanted...other things.” Bozer swallows. “He tried to get protection from one of the cartels. But…” his voice cracks. “They loaned him out to other prisoners. To get favors.” Jack knows exactly what being loaned out required submitting to. He heard the stories from his world’s Mac. 

“I guess he finally said he wouldn’t do it anymore. That he was done. And when they came for him, he didn’t fight them. I guess he was tired. He didn’t think it would ever get better.” Bozer shakes his head. “It’s not fair. He was a good guy. He didn’t deserve to go to prison, or to...to have that happen.”

Jack is sobbing so hard he’s choking. _ Oh Mac. Oh you poor kid. You gave up because without us you couldn’t hope for anything better than a life spent in that hell. _ He understands, and the thought that Mac was so close to that edge when he met him is devastating.

“I could have saved him. I could have saved him.”

He can’t stop repeating it, even as Bozer asks how. And the snow gets thicker, and whiter, and then it and the headstone are the only things left in the world, and the clock striking midnight is the only sound. 

* * *

Jack opens his eyes slowly. 

“Pops?”

The world is white, aside from a very familiar figure walking toward him. Pops looks the way he did when Jack was a kid. His hair’s still black, his scars from the war, lining his face and hands, stand out a little more vividly. Jack can see the puckered one on his arm that he used to call the caterpillar because Pops could make it wiggle like an inchworm by clenching and unclenching his fist. He’s wearing a white t-shirt, jeans, and a cowboy hat, and his smile is wide in his tanned face. 

“What are you doing here?” Jack asks. He looks around for Mac’s tombstone, but it’s vanished. It’s just him and Pops here.

“Fixing a mistake.” Pops smiles sadly. “You ain’t supposed to be here, Jack. What did I tell you about bein’ careful or I’d drag you back from the grave myself?”

Jack frowns. “Mistake? I’m not...not supposed to be dead?”

Pops shakes his head. “Nope. You ain’t even dead, not for real. You’re just being stubborn about lettin’ them drag you back to the land of the living, so I’m here to lend them a hand. Kick you back there like you’re a stubborn steer goin’ in the stock pens.” 

Jack swallows. “You’re sending me back to the real world, right? Cause if it’s the one where Mac’s dead, I don’t think I want to go back.”

Pops nods slowly “He’s still alive and kicking. And he’s waiting for you. You’re the only dad that boy’s got. Try and hang on a little while longer, huh, kid?” Jack thinks it’s weird to hear someone else call him kid, but it’s also so familiar. _ Pops never stopped calling me that. _ Which is probably why, as many times as Mac insists he’s not a child, Jack just can’t quit with the nickname.

“Did you get this too?” Jack asks. _ Is this what happens to everyone? _It’s weird, he doesn’t remember this ever being how it feels to die. And he’s had his heart stopped or his breathing cut off a few more times than he’d like to admit. 

“Son, if I had a choice, I’d ‘a come right back to you, but mine wasn’t up for debate. It ain’t your time to leave that boy yet. He ain’t ready.”

“I wasn’t either.” It’s probably the first time Jack’s admitted that. “I acted like it was okay. For Mom. For everyone. But it wasn’t okay. I was lost and scared and my partner was hurt so bad I thought she was dying, and I thought it was my fault, and I just wanted you to hold me and tell me it was okay.” He can feel the tears streaming down his cheeks, the pain is as raw and fresh now as it was all those years ago. 

“I’m sorry, son.” Gentle arms fold Jack into a hug that smells like leather oil and chewing tobacco. “I didn’t want to leave you either. And I know it hurt. But son, I’m so proud of the man you’ve become. And I never want you to forget that. I just wish I could be there to tell you that in person.”

“This is good enough, Pops.” And it really is. 

A paperclip snowflake is pressed into his palm, a sudden cold, solid thing is this world of fog and haze, and Jack hears the whispered sob from the other side of the divide.

“Please, Jack, come back. Please, dad, I need you.”

“I’m coming, son. I’m coming.”

He lets go of Pops and turns around, the world begins spinning like that old compass, which now that he thinks about it, looks an awful lot like the one Pops kept on his desk from ‘Nam… 

* * *

“Feliz Navidad...Feliz Navidad...I wanna wish you a Merry Christmas from the bottom of my heart…” 

Jack blinks. _ Damn, I’ve hated that song ever since that little op in Kimbala... _ He blinks and the first thing he sees is the star on top of a scraggly little tree sitting beside his bed. _ Oh HELL no. _

He thinks he can be forgiven for punching it. At least Matty might forgive him. She remembers that debacle all too well, and how suggestible that particular Christmas carol made Jack for about a month. _ Not my fault I was so good at my job that the next in line tried to have me assassinate the sitting president of the country... _

“Jack!” It’s sort of a collective scream. _ Oh. Right. I was mostly dead all day. _

He looks past the toppled tree to see Riley, and Matty, and Bozer... And there’s Mac. Alive and here and free.

“Mac?” Jack asks, weakly, hesitantly. “Mac, you...you…”

“He’s awake!” Bozer whoops. “He’s awake!” He pulls out his phone. “Guys, guys, Jack’s awake! He punched out your Christmas tree, Leanna!” 

“He what?” The voice is audible through the phone. 

“He’s probably still thinking we’re in the middle of a mission,” Riley says. “Jack, you’re home. You’re in a hospital in LA. Mission’s over. You can stop punching things.” She wraps her fingers tightly around his.

“Riley.” He pulls her hand a little closer, he can’t stop seeing her lying on that bed, bloodied and exhausted and broken. “You’re okay.” 

“I wasn’t even on the mission, Jack, how hard did you hit your head?” But she’s crying. “Mac and Bozer are fine. They’re safe. They didn’t get hurt, it’s okay.”

Jack turns to Mac, who’s watching him with wide eyes like he can’t fully believe Jack is actually awake. “Mac. Oh kiddo. Oh kiddo. It’s okay.” And then Mac crumbles, leaning forward onto the bed and sobbing. 

Jack pulls Mac into the tightest hug he can manage. The kid doesn’t resist, his own arms wrapping around Jack and pulling him close. _ He was probably scared to death they were going to lose me. _

“Mac, I promise, I’m not goin’ anywhere, I’m never doin’ that.” Jack runs his fingers through the kid’s messy hair. “I’m not gonna leave you, kiddo.”

“Please.” It’s one choked word, but it holds the weight of the world. Jack breathes slowly, carding his fingers through Mac’s messy hair, reassuring himself that he’s holding a living, breathing kid. That at least here, in his own world, Mac is alive, and safe. 

The next few minutes are a chaos of joyful greetings until a nurse rushes in insisting that they’re too much, that other patients are being disturbed, and that Jack’s being given too much excitement and his heart monitor is making them worry.

Jack sighs. “Well, let’s not kill me when we just got me back. I guess I’ll see y’all later.” He does feel exhausted. Almost dying takes a lot out of you.

The team say their goodbyes slowly, giving gentle hugs or hand squeezes. Mac doesn’t leave with the others, even after he gives Jack a tight hug. He stands in the door for a minute, then walks back to sit down by the bed once they’re alone. “Jack?”

“Yeah?”

He frowns. “What...what was that? Earlier? You acted like I was the one who just came back from the dead.”

Jack blames it on the pain meds that a fresh wave of tears roll down his cheeks. “I-While I was under, I had this dream. Or something. About what life would be like if I’d never existed.”

“Riley left the TV on in your room, it was playing ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’, maybe you could hear it?”

Jack just shudders. “It was this Christmas Eve, but everything was different. Riley was alone, and hurt, Matty just got the news that Ethan and his whole family died, Boze was still flipping burgers, Sam and Leanna were just...gone, never came here, and you…” He chokes on the words. “You had died in prison almost two years ago.” 

And the absolute worst part of the whole thing is that Mac says nothing. Doesn’t even blink. _ He knows that’s exactly what would have happened. _Jack begins to cry, again.

“I’m not going anywhere either,” Mac whispers. “I promise.” And for the first time since Jack watched his kid walk away from him in that warehouse last year, barely even recognizing him, he thinks they might be okay again.


	12. Mac+Fallout+Jack

###  311-Mac+Fallout+Jack

HALFWAY AROUND THE WORLD FEELS A LOT CLOSER WITH SAT VIDEO

Mac holds up the beaker to the screen. “Okay, the most important thing is that when you mix these, you make sure it’s in something large, like a bucket. Because it’s going to expand in volume a lot.”

He watches Nasha dump the chemicals together into a large pail. Immediately, a cloud of puffy whiteness starts growing and spilling over the top edge. “It looks like all the pictures. I can’t believe it. We made snow!” Mac can hear the excited chattering of the children as the bucket spills over. 

“That’s not even the best part,” Mac says. “It doesn’t snow here much either, but...well, I’ve done this every year I’ve been home to make Christmas feel special.” He chuckles. “Okay, now just turn on the fan.”

Nasha pauses one last time with her finger on the switch. “And it’s safe? It won’t hurt my kids?”

“Totally non-toxic.” Mac grins. “There is a kind that will burn your skin, but that’s...not at all what we’ve got here.” 

“I do not think I want to know why you know how to make that kind.” Nasha shrugs slightly. 

“It was an accident. High school chemistry.” Mac doesn’t add that he’s totally used it a few times after that, as a distraction. 

And then the fan switches on and a shower of white spills across the room. Mac watches the children laugh and run around and catch flakes on their hands. 

Nasha giggles like she’s one of the kids. “It’s working MacGyver!” 

“I told you so.” He smiles. 

“You really are the one who makes magic.” 

“It’s not magic. Just a chemical reaction…”

“It’s amazing. Thank you Angus.” She picks up a handful of the flakes, blowing them at the computer screen so the video is suddenly filled with white spatters that have nothing to do with the staticky connection over the satellite. Mac smiles and starts to laugh too.  _ Maybe it is magic, after all. _

* * *

Jack holds out his phone at arm’s length, making sure both he and Mac’s faces are fitting into the selfie. 

“Three, two, one. Vegas!”

“Vegas!” Mac says in sync as the camera clicks.

He grimaces and reaches up to brush away a stray chunk of hair that tumbled down into his eyes while he and Jack were trying to figure out the best way to take the picture. “Hold on. Let me try that again.”

Jack shakes his head. “No, no. It's a good one.”

“Let me see it.” Mac grabs for the phone, but after three years, Jack is far too adept at noticing when his cell phone is about to be snatched, and holds it up well out of reach. 

“It's a keeper. Trust me.” He turns back to Mac, slipping his phone in his pocket. “Now, straighten your tie.” Mac does, then brushes a hand over the front of his jacket. “Um...I think maybe laying this down on the couch was a bad idea.” Sure enough, now that he’s looking, Jack can see dog hair all over the jacket. Mickey’s staying with Bozer and Leanna for the weekend, but the hair isn’t so easy to get out of the house.

“Let's go get a lint roller going or something.” Jack says, picking off a few hairs. “And where's your hat? I thought we were doing the Rat Pack thing.”

Mac grimaces. “I don't know about the hat.” Jack just rolls his eyes, Mac looks better in a fedora than  _ he  _ does. “But I do dig the Rat Pack vibe. I love the suits.” He brushes a hand over his own, Jack had a good time helping him pick it out and he thinks the blue was the perfect choice. Even if Mickey’s tan hairs do stand out vividly. “But why are we already wearing them?”

“'Cause we want to show up in style. Like real men.” Jack puffs out his chest proudly. “That's what real men do when they go to Vegas. Show that we mean business the minute our feet hit the Strip.”

“Real men show up in wrinkled suits?”

Jack grins and pats a bag sitting on the counter. “I brought everything you’re gonna need to whip up a portable steamer.” It was actually pretty fun to sort through the piles of junk items in Mac’s garage and try to think like the kid.  _ I mean, I hope I have everything he needs. And if not, I’m sure he’ll figure it out. _

“Oh.”

“Yeah, I got it all covered. All you have to do is sit back, relax, and enjoy some well-deserved time off. With something to tinker with that’s not my phone. See, I know how to plan for road trips with you.” 

“About that. You just survived a near-fatal accident and the first thing you want to do is go to Vegas?” Mac asks. 

“Hey, I  _ survived, _ so I think that means I’m a very lucky guy. And if you’re lucky, Vegas is the place to be.” Jack grins. “Or wait, are you like...banned from casinos for counting cards or something?”

“Um, probably more for my rap sheet,” Mac mumbles. “Those places probably have as much security as an airport.” 

Jack flinches. The last time they flew commercial, even though Phoenix has tried to scrub out any trace of Mac’s previous record, Mac still got randomly pulled out of line and body searched, Jack still isn’t sure it wasn’t due to someone who’d been TSA long enough they recognized Mac from before, when he’d been listed as a terrorist. Jack had argued for half an hour trying to clear things up, and they’d started off the mission with Mac staving off a panic attack the entirety of a sixteen hour flight. 

“I mean, it’s not like we have to go to the casinos. There’s plenty of other stuff to do in Vegas.”

There really is. Jack’s still planning out their itinerary two and a half hours later, with the open road their only companion. 

“Then we begin our tour of the best buffets on the Strip. Spoiler alert: there's eight of 'em. Followed up by a ride on the fastest roller coaster in Las Vegas.”

Mac frowns “Wait, wait. Y-You want to ride a roller coaster after we've eaten at eight buffets?” 

“Mm-hm, I love a good challenge.” Jack says. “Then we put that big brain of yours to work on the blackjack table.”

Mac shakes his head. “Nope. We talked about this. Counting cards is cheating.”

“We’re not gonna be playing at the casino, dude. It’s gonna be a game among friends, and I’ve been bragging you up to them, so do as much of your weird nerd thing as you want.” he chuckles. “I bet my friend Warrick that you could beat even his poker face, and if we win, he’s taking us to dinner, his treat.”Jack grins. “So, after we win big on the table, we're gonna celebrate with a 32-ounce bone-in, tomahawk porterhouse. Yeah, and finally, ending our first night with a show, a show of your choosing.”

“What? I get a choice?”

“Yeah, as long as it's the Legends of Metal tribute or the Blue Man Group, which, really, I think there is no choice there.”

“It's Legends of Metal the whole way, right?” Mac says with a grin. 

“No argument there.”

“I hope after that it’s the hotel and a bed,” Mac says. “Wait, you never told me where we’re staying.”

“That’s because we’re not staying in a hotel. Listen. I have really good friends out there, known ‘em for years. I think Greg and Cath were fighting about who was gonna open up their house for us.” He grins. “We might have to crash on a couch, but it’ll be worth it. They all want to meet you.”

“How exactly do you know these people?” Mac asks. 

“It’s a really long story.” Jack shakes his head. “A CIA cover trying to pin some terrorists’ money laundering down to a single casino ended up being a six-month stint in the LVPD’s forensics lab. Graveyard shift.” He shakes his head. “Apparently it was the only legitimate job opening.” 

“Wait, you worked in forensics? So...you’ve just been pretending to be confused when I do things sometimes?” Mac asks.

“It’s really fun to watch you explain it in normal person terms,” Jack says. “Plus, I do  _ not _ want Matty to think that she can just shuffle me off to the lab whenever she wants. She can do that to you.” 

“How have I literally never heard any of this before?” Mac asks. 

“Because if I told you all my stories right away, you’d get bored.” Jack says. “Besides, that was one of those ops that’s still pretty hush-hush, you know?” He shrugs. “Possibly because I got caught by the Serbian terrorists and buried alive for eighteen hours.” He shudders at the phantom feeling of ants on his skin. Those nightmares are never pleasant. 

“Wait, if the last time you were in Vegas you almost got killed, why do you want to go back?” Mac asks. “You are superstitious about  _ everything _ , and you won’t even talk about Cairo. How come almost dying in Vegas isn’t enough to keep you out of there?” Jack can tell Mac’s sort of teasing.  _ Yeah, I am superstitious. But Cairo was because Riley almost died. Not me. _

“I only almost died. That still counts as lucky.” Still, he’d rather not find himself six feet under again. “Besides, all those Serbians are still doing time in a black site, so we’ve got nothing to…”

The heart-rending crash of metal on metal drowns out the rest of his sentence, and Jack has just enough time to think that maybe Mac was right, and he really should have been more worried, before their car careens off the road and the world goes black. 

* * *

CAR DEALERSHIP

NOT A PIZZA PLACE

Riley keeps her hands tight over Abina’s eyes. 

“All right. Right this way.” She stops before they reach a small curb, making sure Abina knows it’s there. “Watch your step.”

“Okay.” Abina takes a careful step up. “Where are we going? I thought we were going to lunch.”

“Just a little detour. You’ll see in just a minute.” Riley says. She steers the girl around the corner of the building and then pulls her hands away. “Okay. Open 'em.”

Abina gasps at the sight of the rows of cars. “Wait, why are we here?”

“I told you if you passed your driving classes, you’d get a car.” Riley grins.

“I thought you meant an old one!” Abina says. “Like the ones you see on the side of the road. You want to buy me a new car?”

“Well, lease, technically. But yes.” Riley bought her own car outright, since she’s fairly positive Mac can fix anything that ever breaks down and make it last a decade. But with Abina planning to go off to college, Riley will feel better knowing that she can take her car into a shop if something goes wrong and things should be covered. 

“Are you serious?” Abina asks. 

“Absolutely.” Riley grins. “Now go pick one.” She watches with a grin as Abina walks slowly along the row of cars, running her fingers over the polished metal. 

Abina’s got her sights set on CalTech, and Riley’s absolutely certain she’s going to manage it.  _ I didn’t think too many professional hackers were skilled enough to break through my codes, but she’s managed to beat almost everything I’ve handed her.  _

Phoenix could definitely pull strings, but Abina’s insisting on taking the tests and getting in under her own merit, and Riley can totally respect that. She knows the feeling. She had something to prove too. 

Her phone buzzes. It can’t be Jack, he’s going off to Vegas this week with Mac. As a matter of fact, they’ve probably been on the road for hours at this point. She pulls it out and glances at the ID. It’s Matty.

“Hey, Matty, something come up?”

“Riley, we have a problem. Jack’s car just dropped off the face of the earth.” Matty’s voice is tense. 

Riley steps aside and lowers her voice so the other car buyers don’t hear. Abina gives her a concerned look, and Riley mouths ‘Jack in trouble’ before turning back to her phone. “You were tracking their car?”

“Mac almost dies on a semi-weekly basis. I promised Jack I wasn’t going to call them in. Not that I wasn’t going to keep an eye on them. As a matter of fact, he’s the one who asked about it.” 

Riley nods. She can believe it. “Hey, Abina, I think we’ll have to take a rain check on the car. Want to come into the office and help me?” Abina nods. She looks pretty worried, Riley can imagine that after being at the hospital and worrying about Jack almost dying just a few weeks ago, this is putting her on edge. Because it’s certainly scaring Riley. 

“Just...prepare her for what you both could end up finding. Anything that could damage the tracker…” Matty trails off. She doesn’t have to say the rest. Riley knows what she means. The car must have been absolutely destroyed.

_ Mac, Jack, what happened? Where are you? _

* * *

Mac rolls over, pushing away the hands trying to shake him awake. “Jack, we’re on vacation,” he groans quietly. “Can’t I sleep in?” 

The bed feels incredibly hard and uncomfortable. Then again, Jack did say they were crashing on someone’s couch, right? Mac wishes he could remember.  _ What were the names? Wait, who did we decide on? When did we… _

And then the memories of seeing a black SUV t-boning their car, not even enough time to shout, to warn Jack…

He sits bolt upright, gasping and screaming Jack’s name, and a blinding pain sears through his shoulder and hip as he falls back to the stiff surface with a whimper.  _ I can’t have lost him again.  _ “Jack!”

“Easy, easy, bud, I’m right here.” Jack says, and Mac blinks, the blurriness coming into focus as Jack’s worried, bruised face. 

“Jack.” He wants to sit up and hug him, they’re okay, but everything  _ hurts. _

“Hey, kiddo. I was getting worried.” Jack’s voice is gentle. “Your side o’ the car took a real hit. You were scarin’ me.” He runs a hand gently over Mac’s head and neck. “You okay?” 

“I don't know. I think so.” He shivers. The room is kind of chilly. He swallows down a wave of nausea as he tries to sit up. He needs to get his bearings, because his mind is tangling this place with memories of the basements Murdoc’s kept him in. But hearing Jack’s voice and seeing his face, even if it’s kind of blurry, is reminding him he’s not there anymore. 

“Easy, easy there.” Jack helps him sit up, hands hovering carefully over Mac’s body. “It looks like they pulled some glass outta your shoulder, whoever they are.” His hand ghosts over Mac’s face. “And cleaned up your cheek.” Mac grimaces and feels a wound on his face pull tight. “So, good news is, they want us alive. Bad news is, I don’t think that’s actually a good thing for us.”

Mac can agree. He tries to sit up a little more, and something clanks near his leg. He’s suddenly very aware of the feeling of something heavy circling his ankle. He hasn’t felt something like that since he stopped having to wear the ankle tether. 

He looks down, and after blinking a couple of times, he can make out a heavy shackle around his left ankle, attached to a thick chain.  _ Seriously? Who does something like this? _ His stomach crawls at the thought of the last person who used such an archaic method of keeping him from running away.

He tries not to let his panic show in his voice. “What is this place? Some sort of prison?” 

“Or worse,” Jack says. He looks down as Mac reaches for the shackle on his ankle. “It's no use. They're really, really strong. And someone soldered the lock hole closed.” Mac sighs and leans back against the wall, closing his eyes, trying to stave off the massive headache coming on. He needs his medication, but that was in his suitcase in the car.  _ This is going to be bad. _ Without anything to help regulate either the lingering pain or the mood swings, things are going to get much, much worse. 

“You know, I'm feeling really woozy here. You know, like I got a hangover,” Jack says. 

“You feel like you got a hangover?” Mac asks. “We didn’t even make it to Vegas. Right? Or did we?” He genuinely can’t remember, and the last time he woke up with pieces of his memory missing, it was bad. 

“Yeah. My head is throbbing, and judging by the taste in my mouth…” Jack frowns, picking something up off the ground. It looks like a gas mask, and Mac flinches.  _ Those must have been on our faces at some point. Good thing Jack got mine off before I woke up. _ Otherwise he’d probably just have panicked, lost in a memory of El Noche. “Yeah, pretty sure the filters in these gas masks were dipped in ketamine.” Jack frowns. 

“So they drugged us?” Mac’s brain is slow and fuzzy, lagging and struggling to comprehend what Jack’s saying. He knows he knows all the words, they’re just not always stringing themselves together into logical sentences. 

“There you go. That's how they knocked us out for transport right there. Oh, boy. I'm getting a bad feeling about this one, buddy. I'm telling you, man, somebody really planned this out.”

“Which means they’re going to have worked really hard to make sure we can’t escape,” Mac says quietly. He knows what that’s like. He lived with it for three months. 

Mac shivers, and Jack sits down on the bed beside him, putting an arm around his kid’s shoulders gently. “I’m gonna get us outta this, bud. I promise.” 

* * *

THIS PLACE IS DEFINITELY NOT VEGAS

ALSO NOT A GRAVE, SO IT’S SOMETHING

“Okay, kiddo, you feeling up to helping me find a way out of here?” Jack asks. He doesn’t want to push Mac too far, but he knows the kid’s off his meds, they didn’t have those on them, and even if they had they’d probably have been taken. The longer they wait, the more out of it Mac is going to get. 

“They took our belts, they took our socks, they took our shoes.” Mac whispers. Jack can only imagine how horrified the thought of being touched and having his clothes taken while he was unconscious is making the poor kid. 

“Are you okay?” He knows Mac will hear the unspoken question.  _ Did anything happen to you? _

“I...I think so. I’d feel it.” Mac whispers. Jack shudders. It’s just sick and devastating that his kid is so familiar with the consequences.  _ He shouldn’t know what it feels like. He should never have, let alone be so terribly familiar.  _

Jack pushes on past the thought. “It doesn't make sense. Whoever did this...If they wanted us dead, they could've killed us. Shot us. If they wanted intel, they could've chained us to a chair and interrogated us, not have us shackled in whatever the hell this place is.”

“I’m scared, Jack.” The soft voice cuts into Jack’s heart.  _ He’s definitely concussed and feeling not having his meds. _ For Mac to admit that, he’s worse off than Jack thought.  _ We have to get out of here before it gets worse. Before he gets lost in his own head. _

“You know, me and my cousin got trapped in a cellar once,” Jack says. “Back in Texas. We found an abandoned house, and it had big metal doors, and when we got down inside the wind caught the one we opened and slammed it, and the latch fell down.” He shrugs. “I mean, it only took us like fifteen minutes to find the stairs in the dark and feel for the inside release, but I thought we were goners. But we got outta there and I’m gonna get you outta here. I promise.”

“How old were you?” Mac asks, cracking a small smile. Jack’s distraction tactics worked again. 

“Old enough to know better, as Momma would say. See if you can get a little sleep, okay?” Jack asks gently. He’s not sure if it will help or not, but Mac just looks so tired and miserable. And at least hopefully sleep will get him out of this place at least in his head.  _ Although for him, it might just drag him down into nightmares. _ Jack’ll keep an eye on him…

The room is suddenly filled with music blaring at a volume even Jack finds ungodly. He grimaces, tucking his shoulders up to his ears and pressing his hands over the ones Mac already has shoved against his ears.  _ My hearing’s already shot from blasting Metallica on my commute. But Mac’s hurting.  _ Jack can’t forget Riley’s story about shutting down the guys in the college dorm who were blasting their stereo. That was bad enough, this must be ten times worse. Mac is already injured and in pain. 

“Hey! Can’t you see he’s hurtin’?” Jack shouts. “What are you, some kinda monster?” The music tapers off slowly as Mac sits up, and Jack slowly takes his hands away from the kid’s ears. 

“I guess that’s a no on the sleeping, then. Not supposed to sleep with a concussion anyway,” Mac says, forcing a small smile. Jack pulls him close gently. He can tell Mac has to either laugh or cry right now, and that he’s trying to choose laughing, but it’s pretty hard. 

Jack frowns. “Wait, Mac, you know what that means?” 

“That these guys are actually concerned about my health?”  _ Wow, he really is getting loopy, his jokes sound like mind. _

“How hard did you get hit?” Jack asks, continuing the banter for a moment. “Okay, you really need to leave the bad jokes to me, dude. But seriously. They knew I told you to go to sleep.”

“They’re watching us.” Mac shudders. “How?”

Jack looks around the room, taking stock of what’s inside. Besides the metal cot frame Mac was lying on, the chains looped to a ring in the floor, and the gas masks, there’s nothing here...but there is a grating high up on the wall over their heads. He looks up at catches a glint of glass. 

“The vent.” He gently turns Mac’s head, hoping the kid can see it. 

“There's a camera in there,” Mac mumbles.  _ I can’t let him see how much it freaks me out that he’s so out of it.  _ Stating the obvious like that is more Jack’s move than Mac’s. 

“Yeah, I know. And so, how do you want to play this? We act like we don't see it, or?”

Mac makes a shrugging, non-committal response, and Jack stands up, needing to vent his anger on whoever’s on the other end of that. Whoever dared to hurt and torture his boy. “Hey, hey, whosever watching! I tell you what. Come in here, and we'll have a little chat. Okay? We can work this out like adults. Whatever this is about, we can talk.” 

“Don’t think that’s gonna work,” Mac mumbles, his eyes half-lidded again. Jack bites his lip. The poor kid looks so miserable. He needs to rest. But he can’t do that. Unless…

Jack doesn’t have his gun. But he’s spent enough time around Mac to know there’s more than one way to wreck a camera. “Mac, bring that cot over here.” 

Mac does, dragging it along the ground with a screech that’s almost as ear-piercing as the music was. He can’t quite get it to the wall before the chain stops him, so Jack takes it and pushes it the rest of the way, while Mac backs up to give him some slack.  _ We can’t reach the door with it, but we can reach this. _ Plus, Jack’s tall enough to give him a little extra reach. Jack climbs up on it, ripping off one of the tails of his dress shirt and shoving it up against the front of the camera. 

Immediately, the ear-splitting music starts up again. Mac cringes away. Jack ignores the ringing in his brain,  _ Pretend it’s a Metallica concert. Pretend you’re sitting on the front row. _

He knows the music has to be coming from somewhere near the camera, it’s louder up here. So he jumps down, pulls part of the wire mesh off the cot frame’s springs, and starts to unbend it.  _ Camera’s still blocked, they can’t see what I’m doing.  _ Once he has a length of wire that’s sort of straight, he pokes it through the narrow mesh.  _ There’s no screws on the front of this vent plate. _ That’s triggering some kind of memory, but he doesn’t have time to think about it right now. He pokes around until the wire bumps against something, maybe some kind of speaker, and he starts pushing. The sound gets a little quieter and a lot tinnier as he continues pushing, and then he thinks maybe he flipped the whole thing over, because it gets a  _ lot  _ quieter. Or maybe he shoved it down a side duct that leads somewhere else. Now it’s manageable, only about the volume of the radio in the car on a good day. And he knows Mac can fall asleep with that. 

_ Doesn’t matter if we can sleep if we still don’t have water. We’re going to die of dehydration anyway. _ Jack pushes that sick little thought away to the back of his mind. 

He hops down from the cot, turning around to grin at Mac. “Look at me, kiddo, I’m turning into you!”  _ Amazing what desperation and mother bear protective instincts can make you capable of. _ Jack’s always heard the stories of parents who suddenly have enough of an adrenaline rush to lift a car off their child, but this is a new one.  _ Suddenly developing improvising skills is pretty good. _

Mac gives him a weary smile. “Nice job, Jack. While you were up there, did you see any way to get out?”

“Sorry, our luck ain’t that good. Just an old vent with no screws on the cover.” Jack pauses. “Wait a second.” Now his memory’s working for him. “I know what this is. This is a CIA bunker. One of the really old ones, cold war era. They were built as a combination black site and fallout shelter.”  _ We must be in one of the holding rooms.  _

“Which means there’s going to be a lot of things stopping us from getting out,” Mac says. “Do you remember what kind of security they used?”

“It would all be mechanical locks and stuff. Things that wouldn’t go bust if a bomb went off and conked out all the electrical stuff.” Jack frowns. “These places were all supposed to be decommissioned and scrubbed of their CIA presence a long time ago, but off the record a few were kept open, supposedly as storage sites.”

“Why would someone put us in a CIA bunker?" Mac asks. 

“Well, either I’ve finally really pissed off the top brass, or…” Jack frowns. “Someone reactivated one of these places just for a really elaborate trap.” 

“There’s only one person I know who’s crazy enough to play a game like this,” Mac whispers. “Murdoc.” 

* * *

SOMEWHERE BETWEEN LOS ANGELES AND LAS VEGAS

Riley tries to ignore the sickening smells of burned rubber and upholstery. The GTO is absolutely totaled, shoved off the road into a ditch, a still-smoldering hunk of metal.  _ That car is Jack’s baby. He’s gonna be pissed _ . She forces herself to think about him in present tense. To believe that he’s alive  _ to _ be pissed about all this. 

“Ms. Daniels?” An officer asks, stepping forward. “You’re the insurance investigator we were told to expect?”

“I am. This is my associate, Walt Baker.” Riley shakes hands with the man. “Were there any fatalities?” she asks, her stomach knotting at the thought. 

“No, ma’am. The car was empty aside from some suitcases in the trunk.” 

Riley tries not to let too much of her relief show on her face. She can’t be Jack’s daughter right now. She has to stay in character. 

“I’d like to look around the scene if you don’t mind?” She says. “We’ll need to see if we can determine the cause of the accident and who was at fault.” This cover is a good one, she’s usually able to do some basic forensics on scene. The only satellite that had visual of the accident scene at the time it happened is sending corrupted data streams, so Riley’s lost her eye in the sky. She’s going to have to work on the ground like everyone else, and the thought is sending pushes of panic through her. 

She walks slowly around the car. It’s been shoved all the way off the road, and it’s covered in scrapes and dents and scorch marks, but there’s a clear large dent in the passenger side near the door. Riley flinches at the sight of the smashed glass.  _ That’s where Mac would have been sitting. _ And given his luck, she’s sure he didn’t walk away without some nasty wounds. If he was even capable of walking. 

Bozer looks slightly green. “I’m really glad they didn’t find any bodies,” he says faintly. “But I still think I might hurl. This is bad.”

Riley nods.  _ The cops haven’t found Mac and Jack yet. And both of them know that in most cases, it’s best to stay close to the scene of the accident, out of harm’s way but close enough for first responders to see. So they either thought they were in enough danger that they high-tailed it into the desert somewhere, or whoever hit their car took them.  _ She doesn’t really like either of those options. The first means her family is stranded in the middle of nowhere, injured and with no supplies. The second means they’re in the hands of someone very dangerous.

“Okay, well, if there’s a bright side to this, the car was hit. Which means I might be able to get some paint samples if they’re not too scorched, and couple those with tread marks. I can already tell we’re looking for an SUV or truck, based on the bumper height.” 

“You don’t think it was…” Bozer lets his voice trail off.  _ With us, it looks like Murdoc’s reached Voldemort status. He Who Must Not Be Named. _

“I don’t know, Boze.” She’s been trying not to think about that possibility. But they’ve had no luck tracing Murdoc, for months now. He could be anywhere. Which means he could have been here. 

_ If he has both Mac and Jack, they don’t stand a chance. _ She knows each one would do anything to protect the other. And Murdoc would manipulate that, get what he wanted by threats and pitting Mac’s safety against Jack’s life.  _ We have to find them fast. Because Murdoc almost broke Mac when he had him alone. This time, he could break them both.  _

* * *

SOMEWHERE UNDERGROUND

Jack shakes off the feeling of walls closing in and dirt pressing down. This room is large. He doesn't need to be getting claustrophobic. Not when Mac desperately needs him to be calm and rational. Because Vegas was almost a decade ago. Mac was Murdoc’s prisoner only six  _ months _ ago. 

“Are you sure it’s him, dude? I mean, we haven’t heard anything about him since he...since he left that creepy camera at your house.” 

Jack won’t deny that some of this fits the psychopath’s style. But he’s fairly sure that if this  _ was _ Murdoc, more than Mac’s shoes, belt, and knife would be missing, and Jack would be watching helplessly while Mac was…

He forces the thought out of his head. Murdoc will touch Mac again over Jack’s dead body, but he’s afraid that just might happen. This time, he can’t save either of them if Murdoc comes. 

“He could still have been watching us.” Mac shivers. “He wasn’t done with me. He wants me back.” He shakes harder, huddling up tightly as if he’s protecting himself. “He’s going to make me do whatever he wants, or he’s going to kill you.” There’s a cold, resigned calmness in the poor kid’s voice. 

“Hey, kiddo, it’s gonna be okay. Just lay back.” Jack folds his and Mac’s suit coats into a passably comfortable pillow and then spreads his tie over the kid’s eyes to try and block out the glare of the fluorescents. They don’t have to worry about being caught now, with the camera covered, or at least he hopes they don’t. 

_ This has to be the worst for him. _ A head injury like the one Mac clearly got from the collision, then the bright lights, ear-splitting sounds, and dehydration. Jack’s beginning to get a headache himself, he can only imagine how badly this must have aggravated Mac’s lingering symptoms. 

Mac pushes the tie away. “Please don’t.” His hand is trembling. “It reminds me of...Murdoc.” Jack flinches.  _ What did that bastard do to him? _ Jack doesn’t really want to know the details, but he also doesn’t want to unconsciously do something that’s going to give Mac terrible flashbacks. 

“I’m sorry, kiddo. Anything else I shouldn’t do?”

Mac shrugs. “I’d like to get that chain off my leg, but that’s not going to happen.”

_ Murdoc chained him then? When he was weak and sick and didn’t even remember who he was? _ Now Jack really wants to get his hands on that monster.  _ When we catch him, I’m going to kill him. Slowly and painfully if I can, but I’m going to kill him.  _

Still, he doesn’t think  _ this  _ is Murdoc. Sure, Mac knows better than anyone how that creep works, but Mac also is probably deathly afraid of the same thing happening, and he might be jumping at shadows, seeing things where they’re not. Murdoc likes to gloat. Jack can’t imagine that they would have been left alone this long without the man coming in here to make some creepy pompous villain speech. He’s nuts like that. 

_ And I’m not sure he could keep his hands off Mac this long.  _ No, all of Jack’s instincts say this is someone else. But he can’t afford to completely dismiss the idea that it’s Murdoc. He could be tricking them. 

“What would you need to get off that chain?” He needs a way to distract Mac. 

Mac sits up and looks around slowly, running a finger over the rusty bedframe and frowning. 

“Well, I think...I think I have everything here but a way to start a fire. Without my knife...” 

Jack jumps, and starts digging into his pockets.  _ They took everything else off me, but they might not have noticed… _

Sure enough, the little rectangle of metal is still tucked between the waist of his pants and his stomach, the keychain clip attached to the last button of his shirt. He pulls it out, running a finger over the engraved designs of the four card suits on the front and back. 

“My lucky lighter. I keep this card very close to the vest,” Jack says with a grin. He hands it to Mac. “See what you can do with that, huh?”

“Do I even want to know why you have it tucked there?” Mac asks. 

“Hey, there’s a lotta pickpockets in Vegas. I want it somewhere I’ll feel it if someone tries to take it.” Jack chuckles. 

He watches Mac get to work, the familiar sight of the kid scrounging the things he needs from his meager surroundings. Jack isn’t entirely sure what he’s doing with the rust from the cot frame, but he knows Mac’s got a plan.

“What is that?” He asks, watching the kid carefully mix powder together on the floor.  _ Talking will help keep him focused, keep his mind on what he’s doing.  _ He keeps his voice low in case their conversation is being monitored as well. He took out the camera, but...

“Homemade thermite. It’ll burn through those chains…”

“Great.”

“And also possibly our feet.”

“Ouch. Let’s, you know, try not to do that. I kind of need my feet for running outta here, you know?” Jack shakes his head. 

“Well, it’s almost ready,” Mac says. “It’s going to burn hot and fast, so get the chain over it now where we want it to break.” He’s holding a chunk of the bed rail as well. “I’m going to break it apart once it’s hot.”

Jack nods and holds the chain as close as he dares without scorching his foot. He doesn’t particularly want a large line of metal dragging behind him like he’s Marley’s ghost or something.  _ I’ve had enough Christmas ghosts to last a lifetime. _

Mac is right about how hot and fast his thermite burns. Jack’s foot does feel kind of scorched by the time the metal melts enough to pry it apart, but it’s worth it to be able to stand up and walk around and not worry about jerking the kid around like a dog on a short leash. 

Mac holds up a small handful. ‘Saved enough for the door’ he mouths, and Jack gives him a grinning thumbs up.  _ Okay, we might actually make it out of here alive. _ And find out who did this to them, so Jack can make them pay. 

* * *

THE WAR ROOM

BOZER FEELS USELESS

“I don’t see why we aren’t out there looking right now,” Bozer says. He knows he sounds like a pouty teenager, but he feels too worried and miserable to care. Mac and Jack are gone, missing, somewhere out there, and he’s stuck here in this room, not even able to look for any clues Mac might have left. 

“We checked the area for footprints. There was nothing,” Riley says. “Whoever did this probably took Mac and Jack in the car, which means our best shot at finding them is getting the paint residue to the lab, which we did, and trying to clear up sat feeds. Which I’m doing now.”

Bozer nods. He understands it logically. But everything in him is screaming for them to do more. To be out there grid searching the entire damn desert if they have to. 

“As soon as we find anything, we’ll mobilize on it,” Leanna says. She’s busy combing through Mac and Jack’s digital footprints, trying to see how someone found out where they were going to be. 

“The more time we waste, the more time Murdoc has to…” Bozer can’t finish. 

Riley frowns. “I actually don’t think this is Murdoc. He likes to taunt, or gloat. He sent Mac’s dog tags and pictures last time.”

“He did wait a few days first,” Bozer says weakly. He’s still waiting for a video. A photo. Something even worse. He doesn’t want to see it, but at the same time he wants it over with because his imagination of what Murdoc might do is only creating worse and worse scenarios. 

Leanna nods. “I don’t know, Boze. Something about this...it’s not his style.”

“Smash and grab with a car accident? He blew up an armored transport with a rocket launcher last year,” Bozer says. “I think it is his style.”

Riley shakes her head. “But he called us and told us he was doing it. And when he kidnapped Mac he left a signature. The knife and the mask on the porch. He would have given us some clue that this was him.”

“Unless he learned from his mistakes.”  _ I want it not to be him too, but that’s probably wishful thinking.  _

“People like Murdoc follow patterns almost compulsively,” Leanna says. “Like the way he used to send his victims messages. He knew that risked them taking measures to protect themselves. But he did it anyway, because it’s something he  _ had _ to do. I think leaving us taunts is one of those things. He can’t help himself doing it.”

“So you don’t think it was him either?” Riley asks.

“Look at the accident site,” Leanna says. “He hit the car on the passenger side. The side  _ Mac  _ was on. He would have known Jack always drives his own car. I can’t imagine Murdoc risking killing the person he’s so obsessed with owning. If anything, Murdoc would have hit Jack’s side, he’d probably be twisted enough to want Mac to see Jack dead.”

As sick as it is, Bozer knows it makes perfect sense. Leanna’s right. That accident risked killing or seriously injuring Mac. And even if that’s Murdoc’s end goal, he would want it to be slow and personal and intimate, not the sudden blackness of a car crash. 

“So if it isn’t Murdoc, who wants to hurt them?” He asks.

“Um, guys?” Jill says. “I might be able to help with that.” She holds up a sheet of paper and a test tube. “But...it doesn’t make sense.”

“Nothing today makes sense, Jill,” Riley says. “What is it?”

“The paint color and composition is an ultra heavy duty type used to paint armor plating on secure transport vehicles. Like cars used to transport diplomats. And based on the damage left by the bumper, it was a pushbar type, law enforcement style.”

“So some bad apple cop or agent has them?” Leanna asks. “I mean, we have exposed corruption in the CIA and FBI more than a few times.”

“And when Mac was the Phoenix, he pissed off a lot of dirty cops who were in cartel pockets,” Bozer adds. “But the question is, who would have known where they were? These people didn’t take Mac and Jack from their house. Why wait and ambush them in the desert? There’s something here we’re missing.” 

“There is. And if I could just get this sat feed cleared up, it would probably give us that piece,” Riley says. “But this file is corrupted badly. I’m not even sure how something messed up a CIA sat stream so much.”

“Bozer, you should get some rest,” Leanna says. “It’s been eighteen hours. If we find anything, we’ll get you.” Her hand is warm and gentle on his back. “You’re not going to do Mac or Jack any good if you give yourself an ulcer before we even find them.”

Bozer allows her to steer him to the War Room couch, settle a pillow under his head, and drape a blanket (they always have a few over the backs of the furniture, this isn’t close to the first time agents have had to crash in here during long ops.

He doesn’t want to fall asleep. Not while Mac and Jack are out there in danger. But like it or not, his eyes are closing, and the next thing he knows, he’s being shaken awake by a hand on his shoulder. Leanna is bending over him with dark-shadowed eyes and two mugs of coffee. He takes one and sits up enough to let her sit beside him. He can see Riley’s messy bun over the back of one chair. 

“How’s she holding up?” He asks. Jack is basically her dad. She must feel worse than he does, but he was too self-centered to notice. He suddenly feels sick, and not from black coffee on an empty stomach. 

“She’s hanging in there. As long as there’s something she can do, she’ll keep going. It’s if we find a dead end that I’m going to start worrying about her. When she runs out of things she can try.” Leanna gives him an unreadable look. “She’s resting her eyes, we’ve been taking shifts all night watching the computer try and clean up the sat feed.”

“You can both rest for a while,” Bozer says. “I know enough about the computer not to break it.”

Leanna gives him a grateful smile and sets her coffee mug aside. Bozer tucks her in like she did him, takes a glance at Riley who’s snoring with her knees up against her chest and her phone in one hand, and then sits down in front of the computer endlessly cycling numbers. It’s all he can do now. Watch and pray. 

* * *

“Well, this should melt through the lock on the door.” Mac says. “Stand back.” His hands are already scorched from using the thermite the first time. Not nearly as bad as the burns from New Orleans, but he’s regretting this, especially since he can’t even stick them under cold water or put on ice. His mouth waters at the thought, or at least as much as it can. He’s so thirsty. 

“Wish I had my gun right now,” Jack mumbles. He’s holding the metal rod from the bed, but it probably won’t do much good against someone this determined to keep them trapped. Then again, they can’t see anything happening in the room, so maybe the element of surprise will work in their favor.

He lights the thermite he’s jammed into the crack in the door, shielding his eyes from the bright glare. He can hear the cracking as the heated, expanding metal breaks the concrete around the lock mechanism. “Okay, Jack, now!” 

Jack shoves the metal bar in, pries the door free, and then raises the still glowing end, ready to pound whoever or whatever is on the other side. But there’s no one. Just another room. This one with what looks like some gas cylinders stacked in one corner, and a table in the middle of the room with a bowl on it. There’s a second locked door beyond that, just like the one they just got open. Mac sighs, running his sooty hand through his hair. 

Jack is the first to speak. “It’s another room.” He looks all around slowly. “Mac, you got anymore of that thermite?”

“Probably not enough.” Mac frowns. He glances around the room. Maybe he won’t need it. He walks carefully over to the gas cylinders, but a quick test confirms that all of them are empty. Still, they’re something. _ Now I know this isn’t Murdoc. He never would have left me with something obvious I could use to escape, like this.  _ Not unless he wanted them to get away. But Mac doesn’t think that would happen twice.

The confirmation that it truly isn’t Murdoc who has them here is so reassuring Mac almost laughs.  _ We’re still trapped, still potentially going to die of dehydration down here, and all I can feel is grateful that I’m not in the hands of that psychopath.  _ Dying actually sounds more appealing.

He glances around the room again, for anything else he might be able to use to help them get past this next door. 

The bowl on the table is full of something that looks truly disgusting. “Okay,” Mac mumbles. “Are we sure this place isn’t abandoned? Cause something got left out long enough to get maggots.”

Jack frowns, then walks over to look at the dish, picking up one of the creepy crawly things and rolling it between his fingers. “Those aren’t maggots. Those are Sago worms.” 

“Huh?”

“Indonesian delicacy. I remember these guys. Got dared to eat a whole dish of them when I was with the CIA...with Hadley. And Griggs.” Jack’s voice goes soft and serious. “Mac, I know what this is about. One of my first ops. Jakarta.”

* * *

JAKARTA

2008

_ “Eat up, Jacky boy.” _

_ Jack stares at the plate of worms in front of him. Not that he hasn’t taken dares and eaten worms in the schoolyard as a kid, but those were good ol’ Texas earthworms. Not these grubs that look like they’re gonna burrow into his stomach and make a home in his brain. “Thanks a lot, Hadley.” _

_ “Ten bucks says Dalton's too scared to try them,” Hadley says from three tables over, punching his partner’s shoulder. Griggs just shakes his head.  _

_ “No, I'm not scared, Hadley. I'm just saving 'em for you. The CIA's most un-dynamic duo in history is gonna want to have a little something to celebrate once I slap the cuffs on the target.”  _

_ “Yeah, rookie?” Griggs asks. “You’re the new guy. Which means you ought to be glad eating the local delicacy is as far as we’re willing to go with a hazing.”  _

_ “What are we, college frat boys?” Jack asks, but he’s chuckling in spite of it. He pokes the worms around on the plate. “Just looking for a nice tasty one, here. You gotta be particular, you know.” _

_ Their overwatch’s voice comes through the comms. Waller sounds sort of pissed, and Jack frowns. The guy’s been acting weird since they got the Samrozi op. “Cut the chatter. Samrozi's gonna be here any minute. Dalton, you get Samrozi to give up the location of that weapon. And then Griggs and Hadley will move in and take him down.” _

_ “Affirmative.” _

_ “And no mistakes. We got a lot riding on this. That HQ-16 could take down a commercial airliner.” But the way Waller says it, he’s worried about something other than those missiles. This op is personal to him for some reason.  _

_ He looks up to see a short man walking up to him. “Here we go, boys. Elvis has just entered the building.” He’d cultivated a working relationship with the guy’s right hand man back in his Delta days, using him to try and get the location of his boss. He’d never had a chance to back then, but now he was the logical choice to move on the CIA intel that Samrozi had acquired a missile system.  _

_ Samrozi hangs back while his associate approaches. “ _ Selamat siang, _ Yovan, Samrozi,” Jack says. _

_ “ _ Selamat siang _ , Nigel.” Yovan gives him an appraising look. “ _ Apa kabar _ ?” _

_ “Me? Oh, I'm doing great. Yeah. Thanks.” _

_ “I hear you are looking to buy my merchandise,” Samrozi says. “Yovan assures me you are a man I can trust.” _

_Jack waves to the seat across from him. “Hey. Have a seat. Relax. Look, I even picked up the tab on dinner.” He pushes the plate of worms across the table, picking up one and popping it in his mouth to prove he hasn’t poisoned them._ Much_._ _His other hand feels the empty bottle of sedative in his pocket. _The special Jack Dalton worm barbecue sauce._ And those things definitely need it. Jack forces himself not to spit out the one in his mouth. “Boys, have a seat.”_

_ Both of the men sit down, but only Yovan takes a handful of the worms.  _ He trusts me. Samrozi doesn’t.

_ Yovan downs the worms, then pulls a photo out of his pocket, laying it on the table. “Manufactured in 2011. Four HE-frag warheads. 40-kilometer range. Fully functioning. No damage.” _

_ Jack picks up the photo. “Way to go, Sammy. So, what's next? A little in-person look-see at the merchandise? You guys could text us the address. We'll meet you there.” _

_ “First, a question.” Yovan says around another handful of the worms. “What have you been doing since last we met?”  _

_ “Me? Oh, I've been kicking ass down in South America, baby. Yeah. You know, things got a little slow around here. We like to go where the action is.” It’s not really a lie. Jack’s Delta team spent their last tour dealing with several hot spots in South America.  _

_ “You will forgive us if we do not believe you without confirming,” Samrozi says. “I will call my associates and ask them about you, _ Nigel _ .” Jack can tell he’s not totally sold on the cover story. But Jack can sell it more. _

_ Unfortunately he never gets the chance.  _

_ Yovan turns, clearly scanning the area for danger, and locks eyes on Hadley and Griggs. And Jack knows they’re made.  _

_ “We’ve been made! Take them down!” Jack shouts, flipping the table up to give himself a barrier. Yovan pulls his gun, but his shots are going wild, the sedative already starting to kick in. And Samrozi is running. Pinned down, Jack can’t get to him.  _

_ “Griggs, Hadley, do you have eyes on Samrozi?” Waller shouts through the comms.  _

_ “Got him. Let's go!” _

_ Jack takes advantage of how the confused screaming of the other people who were eating on the patio seems to be making Yovan’s disorientation worse. He shoves the table forward, into the man’s legs, knocks the gun out of his hands, and pulls the man’s arms behind his back.  _

_ “Yovan's in custody,” He says into the comms. “Do we have Samrozi?”  _

_ Griggs’s voice comes through the comms winded. “Negative. We lost him in the crowd.” _

_ “Bring Yovan back to op HQ and awair further orders,” Waller says.  _

_ Jack nods and pulls his prisoner to his feet, even though the man sort of looks like he wants to fall asleep on the sidewalk. “Let’s go, man.” _

* * *

PRESENT DAY

Mac looks up as Jack stops talking. It’s kind of strange to think of Jack as a junior agent, getting grief from guys who have more experience. As long as Mac’s known him, Jack’s been the one with the experience and the words of wisdom.

“We eventually got Samrozi, though.” Jack says. “Just...shoulda been a lot sooner.” His eyes are shadowed with guilt. “If we’d managed to catch him that day, two good men would have been spared a lot of pain.” 

Mac bites his lip. He knows Jack is the type of person to live with regrets, to let them take up space inside his heart, to let them eat away at him. Mac knows because he’s the same kind of person. When something goes wrong, he can’t let it go. He turns the problem over and over in his head, trying to find a solution. 

And Jack always helps pull him out of those places. Now Mac guesses it’s his turn to do the same for Jack. 

“It wasn’t your job to get Samrozi, that was up to Hadley and Griggs,” Mac says. “So it’s on them…”

Jack’s sudden glare could have set Mac’s thermite on fire without the lighter. “Don’t say that, Mac. Don’t you ever say that.”

Mac flinches. He knows Jack isn’t actually angry with him, just tired and dehydrated and probably concussed just like Mac. He’s got almost as little control of his emotions as Mac does right now, but that doesn’t reassure Mac all that much. Because he can’t think straight either, and all his damaged brain can process is another father figure he finally pushed to the point the man got angry. 

He’s not aware there are tears sliding down his cheeks until Jack steps up slowly in front of him and wipes them away. “God, kid, I am  _ so _ sorry. I never shoulda snapped at you like that. I was so out of line.”

“It’s okay,” Mac says softly. “I’m sorry too.” Jack’s hands brushing away the tears are grimy but gentle. It’s alright now.

“It’s not your fault. You don’t know the whole story,” Jack says softly.

* * *

JAKARTA 

2008

_ Jack climbs the steps to their apartment with Griggs, both of them holding those weird fruit drinks they had to go back for a second round of because the first ones are currently all over their shirts thanks to a careless guy on the sidewalk.  _ Dude was six-foot-two at least. And had crazy muscles. _ Jack wasn’t in the mood for another scuffle today.  _

_ “I'm gonna have to introduce you to Sarah when we get back,” Griggs says. “Adrenaline junkie, just like you. You'll like her a lot.” He hands Jack his drink and pulls out his phone. “You know what? I'll call her right now.” _

_ “You know, relationships with fellow agents are highly discouraged,” Jack says. “If Webber ever finds out…” Jack shrugs. He knows _ she’s _ got some sort of off the books liaison with Reigns, he can tell even though they’ve both tried to sweep it under the rug. But he doesn’t think pulling that out as an argument would exactly help his case.  _

_ “Ooh. Matty the Hun is nothing to mess with, you got me there man.”  _

_ But it looks like they have a more immediate problem of someone pissed off to worry about. As they reach the landing for their floor, Jack can see Hadley driving his knuckles into the wall. “Unbelievable. That son of a bitch.” He snaps. _

_ Jack can hear the sounds of screaming and sobbing through the door. He cringes. He knows as well as anyone else that interrogations can get very messy, but this...it sounds really bad.  _

_ “Hadley, what's going on? Come on, I thought you were, like, the top of the class of CIA interrogators. Why aren't you in there working on Yovan right now?” Jack asks. _

_ “Waller pulled rank, kicked me out.” _

_ Griggs frowns. “He did what?” _

_ “Nine years I’ve been doing this. First time anyone's ever said I wasn’t fast enough. I'm thinking about calling Ops Command.” _

_ Griggs puts a hand on his shoulder, steering Hadley away from the wall. “Hey, man, you know I always got your back, but I'm not sure this guy's worth crossing. Let it go. It's not gonna get you anywhere.” _

_ A louder scream echoes down the hall, and Jack flinches. He steps up to the door, testing the handle. It’s definitely locked.  _

_ “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Griggs says. “He kicked Hadley out. He’s not just gonna let you…” _

_ “I don’t care.” Jack says, and then backs up and throws his weight against the cheap door. The wood around the lock breaks and he stumbles into the room.  _

_ Waller turns to glare at him, but then turns his attention back to a beaten and bloodied Yovan hanging from the ceiling by his wrists. “Dalton, can’t you see I’m busy?” He drives another fist into Yovan’s stomach. “You can make this stop anytime!” _

_ “Hey, Waller…” Jack says. He doesn’t want to fight the guy, but he can’t just stand here and watch this.  _

_ “Just tell me where to find Samrozi.” Waller’s voice is ice and anger.  _

_ “Waller! Waller! What the hell do you think you're doing?” Hadley asks. Apparently even seasoned CIA agents think this is too much. Jack feels a little better with them backing him. He didn’t particularly care who else stood with him doing the right thing, but it feels good to know he’s got support. _

_ “He's playing games,” Waller says.  _

_ Griggs shakes his head. “Look, we all want the same thing. This isn't the way to do it.” _

_ “You're right. We need an answer now.” Waller’s eyes are glittering with an unhinged fury. Jack shivers. And then the man pulls a gun from his belt and jams it against Yovan’s forehead.  _

_ “Waller. Put the piece away,” Hadley says. Jack can see the man’s hand going slowly toward his own gun. He saw the insanity in the man’s eyes too.  _

_ “Where are those weapons?” Waller practically screams. _

_ “I don't know!” Yovan’s voice bubbles around cracked ribs and broken teeth.  _

_ “Where is Samrozi's warehouse?”  _

_ “Waller, put the piece away, man!” Griggs shouts.  _

_ “I don't know where!” Yovan yells.  _

_ “Tell me now!” _

_ “I don't know!”  _

_ Waller snarls. “All right, I've had enough of this. You are useless to me.” Jack knows what’s going to happen next, and in one stride he’s closed the distance between himself and Waller and wrenched the gun out of the man’s hands, throwing it aside and keeping a firm grip on Waller’s wrist to stop him from hitting anyone, Jack or Yovan. _

_ “No. This is over. You hear me? It's over!”  _

_ “ Get your hands off of me! I outrank you! That is an order.” Waller tugs at his wrist, but Jack’s grip is iron. He knows the man won’t be able to break it. “I’m going to have you court-martialed for this, Dalton!” _

_ “You can file it under ‘Jack don't care’.” _

_ “Let go!” Waller snaps. Jack just shoves him toward the door.  _

_ “Get out.” _

* * *

Mac picks at the string coming loose from the sleeve of his shirt. He feels a little sick at the story of what happened to Jack’s informant. He doesn’t like hearing about the people who are supposed to be on the right side of things acting like that. Because that’s what some of the guards in prison were like. And thinking about the same being true in the CIA or possibly even Phoenix scares him. More than he wants to admit.  _ People are people, and there are always some who want power just to abuse it. But that doesn’t make it any easier to live with. _

“You think Waller did this to get revenge?”

“My after-action report  _ was _ what got him booted from the CIA,” Jack says. “But no, he couldn’t have done this.”

“Why?”

“Because he went so far off the deep end after he got fired that he put a gun to his head a year later.” Jack sighs. “We should have seen it coming, I guess. He was so volatile. And all that anger and frustration turned inward.”

“There wasn’t anything you could have done,” Mac says softly. “You probably saved a lot of lives getting him kicked out.”

“Yeah, and I’ve lived with the thought that that’s what sent him over the edge for the rest of my life.” Jack whispers. “I know I did the right thing. I do. But it doesn’t make it any easier to live with. And he’s not the only one whose death I’m living with from that damn op.” 

* * *

JAKARTA

2008

_ “You sure this is where Samrozi's keeping the weapon?” Jack asks, looking up at the warehouse. _

_ “I made it clear to Yovan, if he wanted to see sunlight again, he needed to help us find the HQ-16,” Hadley says. He sounds vindicated that he, and not Waller, got the answers.  _

_ “Okay.” Jack watches until the guard out front walks around the corner of the building where he and the others are hiding, before putting him in a chokehold that knocks him out in moments.  _ Won’t be long, I’m sure, before someone realizes he’s not where he should be, but hopefully we can be gone by then.

_ “Let's go, let's go.” Griggs picks the padlock on the front door and lets them all into the dim, humid interior. Despite the lack of good light, Jack can see the warheads on a trailer in the middle of the room, parked alongside several canvasback military trucks that are probably full of smaller grade weapons.  _ Wish we could blow the whole place _ . He hates seeing gun runners get the chance to move their merchandise. But orders are orders, and he’s broken enough for one day. He thinks Matty will have his back on the Waller thing, but there’s no being one hundred percent sure.  _

_ “Okay, we found 'em. Now, how do we sneak 'em out without alerting everyone on Samrozi's payroll?” Griggs asks. _

_ “Sneak? To hell with that. I say we just drive the thing out of here, guns blazing,” Jack says. “You think these guys are gonna shoot at armed warheads?” _

_ “Yeah, I'm with Dalton,” Hadley says. “Waller, you with us?” _

_ Jack hates that they’re still answering to the guy, but it’s not like they have much of a choice. He’s the mission oversight. And they still have to get this done, issue or none.  _

_ “Proceed, but hurry,” Waller says.  _

_ Jack looks from the unhitched trailer to the line of military trucks. “I’m gonna have to hook this truck up, or these bad boys aren’t going anywhere,” Jack says. He jumps inside the first truck in the line, checking the front visor for keys and then hotwiring it when the cursory search turns up nothing. The engine growl seems too loud, like they’re going to draw attention down on themselves. “Help me back it up.” He used to be really good at hitching tractors to hay wagons back in the day, but tractors didn’t have canvas backs that he can’t see past to the hitch.  _

_ “Okay, you’re doing good. Pretty much all lined up,” Hadley says. “Keep it coming, now.”  _

_ “Guys, you have incoming,” Waller says. “Two jeeps, eight men.” _

_ “Here we go, boys. Stay frosty,” Hadley says, pulling out his gun. _

_ “We're almost out of here,” Jack says.  _

_ “Or we go say hello,” Hadley replies. “Griggs, let's go buy the rookie some time.” _

_ “I'm with you, pal. Got your six.” Griggs pulls his own sidearm. “Get that truck hitched up, Dalton, we’ll keep these guys occupied.” _

_ Jack tries to focus on lining up the hitch on the truck and trailer, and not on the sounds of gunfire that filter through his comms.  _

_ He flinches when a sharp cry rips through the line. “That doesn't sound good. Hey, Waller, Griggs and Hadley are taking a lot of heat out there. I'm gonna go and provide support, ASAP.” _

_ “Negative, Dalton. Proceed with your mission. This op means nothing if we don't get that weapon.” Waller’s voice is bitter.  _ He doesn’t care about any of us, especially not after we challenged him and won. He’s probably like to see us all get killed today.

_ Jack hurries things up as much as he can. It feels like an even higher stakes version of trying to get the hay loads in before a storm breaks. His hands fly through the hitching steps as quickly as they ever did back on the ranch. He finally stands up, wiping greasy hands on his shirt.  _

_ “Okay, Griggs, Hadley, I’m no minister but these two just got hitched, and it’s a match made in heaven.” Jack tries to disguise the worry in his voice with the joke. “Time to wrap things up. Let's go.” _

_ “Aw, but we finally have them on the run.” _

_ “All right, Hadley, Griggs, fall back,” Waller says. “We're getting the hell out of here right now.” _

_ “Copy that. Falling…” _

_ And then the blast of an explosion rips through the comms and rocks the warehouse. Jack stumbles, flinching, reaching for his ear.  _

_ “Respond. Fellas, can you hear me? Guys, you there?”  _

_ Waller’s voice is the only one that comes through. “Dalton, you've got more bogeys inbound. Get out now.” _

_ “Nah, I’m not leaving without Griggs and Hadley. We don't have the whole family in the van yet there, boss.” _

_ “Griggs and Hadley are dead. Your position is about to be overrun. Get to exfil.” _

_ Jack tries to ignore the cold yawning pit opening up in his stomach and in front of his feet. He’s lost men before. But this is different. Even when a Delta got hit, Jack and his team carried them out. “No way. We're not leaving without them.” _

_ “That is an order!” Waller practically screams.  _

_ And then Jack hears the pounding on the doors. If he doesn’t move, he’s going to die and Samrozi will still have the missiles. Swallowing back a combination of an angry scream and a bitter sob, he leaps into the truck, throws it in gear, and heads straight for the doors.  _ I’m taking as many of those bastards with me as I can.

* * *

“I thought I was gonna die,” Jack says softly. “Thought a stray bullet would hit those warheads and I’d be toast. But somehow, I was lucky. Got them out, got back to the CIA alive. But...nothing was the same after that.”

“I’m sorry.” Mac’s voice draws Jack back to the present.

“We found out six months later Waller was wrong. Or lying. Not that it mattered at that point. But Hadley and Griggs weren’t dead. Samrozi captured them, and we got Griggs back when we finally took that bastard down for good.” Jack’s stomach still turns at the memory of how they found the man. “He’d been tortured. Badly.” 

Mac winces, his hands rubbing at the scars on his arms. “And Hadley?”

“Samrozi had already killed him. A month before we got there.” 

Mac swallows hard, starting to shake.  _ This was a mistake. Telling him that story. Poor kid’s got his own traumatic memories. _ Jack sits down next to Mac, putting an arm around his shoulders, and Mac leans into him, despite the stale heat in the room. 

“And that mission is what this is about?” Mac asks.

“I think so. And...I think I know who did this to us. It has to be Griggs.”

“He’d do this?” Mac asks. “He didn’t sound like the type.”

“I don’t have to tell you that going through hell can really mess a person’s head up,” Jack says gently. “He was never the same. They found him basically catatonic. Took over a year for him to really come back. We actually didn’t think he would at all.” Jack says.  _ And I was so afraid, when we got you back, that I was going to watch it happen all over again.  _

“He could set something like this up?” Mac asks.

“It makes sense. Griggs went back to the CIA afterward, despite everyone’s better judgment, but he had something to prove, I guess, so he tested again and managed to pass. He rode a desk the rest of his career, but that would have been right around the time all these places were getting shut down. He might even have been in charge of the project.” 

“And he waited for the right time to get revenge,” Mac whispers. “But why now?”

“Because it’s been ten years to the day since his partner died.” Jack says. “Or it was when we were snatched.”

“Was?” Mac asks. 

Jack rubs his fingers over the scruff starting to grow on his chin. “My guess, we’ve been in here...thirty-six hours give or take.” 

“You can tell time by your beard growth?” Mac asks, almost giggling. The lack of food, sleep, and water is making him really loopy. Lack of medication is probably contributing to that too. 

“Little trick I learned in sniper school. Wouldn’t work for you and your baby face. What do you grow, a little peach fuzz a week?” Jack chuckles. 

Mac rolls his eyes. “Keep pushing, old man. I’ll make  _ you  _ eat those disgusting worms.” Jack wonders when Mac’s going to listen to him. The things are nasty, but they’re a little nutrition, and there’s at least a little moisture there. 

There’s a soft clicking sound, and Jack frowns, cocking his head like a dog and listening.  _ Sounds like it’s coming from the door… _

The door swings open on creaky hinges, and Jack rushes the figure in the opening.  _ Maybe I can get the upper hand... _ But he’s weak from dehydration and the concussion, and a fist to his stomach sends him stumbling backward. A cattle prod in the ribs takes him to the floor. 

“Stop!” Mac shouts, and Jack wants to tell him not to fight, that if Jack’s too beat to do it, Mac doesn’t stand a chance, but the kid’s already moving. Jack swears the man in the door holds the cattle prod on Mac longer than he did on Jack. But maybe it’s just that time seems to slow down when his kid’s hurting, and that every one of Mac’s stifled pained screams lasts an eternity in Jack’s head.

“I expected you to try something like that,” a voice Jack hasn’t heard in ten years says. Jack’s vision is blurring and wobbly, but he can make out the form of someone standing over him, the still crackling cattle prod in hand.

The man sets down a box on the floor. Jack groans. 

“Since it seems you’ve managed to figure out the clues in this little escape room so well, I’ll give you the last one in person.” The smile on his face is demented. “One lives, one dies.” 

He backs away and the door slams shut.

Jack grimaces as he forces himself to his feet. The crackle of electricity is still running along his veins. “Mac?”

The only answer is a weak whimper. 

Jack drags himself along the floor, unable to stand without swaying, and sits next to Mac. The kid’s pulse is racing, his breathing weak and shaky. He’s curled into himself, shaking. “Hey, hey, it’s okay. He’s gone now.”

“Why…” Mac whispers, his voice hoarse from screams and the dryness of his throat. 

“Guess he was listening to us talk. Figured as long as we knew the truth, he’d show his face. Or what’s left of it.” Jack remembers the nasty scar that twisted across Griggs’s cheek and jaw when they found him. 

“He left...box...what’s in there?” Mac asks, pushing himself up on one elbow and groaning. Jack’s reminded sickeningly of the torture scene in  _ The Empire Strikes Back. _ Mac looks about as weak as Han Solo when the stormtroopers toss him back in the cell. And Jack feels as helpless as Chewie, screaming at something he can’t fight. 

He pulls the box over and opens the lid. Inside is a revolver, and when Jack opens the chamber, there’s only one bullet.  _ Russian Roulette? _ But then he remembers what Griggs said just before the door closed.  _ One lives, one dies. _

It looks like Mac does too. He sits up a little straighter. “That’s for us, isn’t it?”

“That’s how he meant it. But he doesn’t know you, kid. I think you can use this to help get us out, right?” Jack hopes so.  _ Gunpowder. Firing pin. Barrel’s metal... _

“We have to play his game. He’s not going to let us go if we don’t.” Hearing that stops Jack cold.  _ He can’t be serious.  _ Mac coughs weakly. “Jack…”

“I’m not going to shoot you, Mac. I can’t.” Jack can’t forget the sight of the headstone with Mac’s name carved on the cold grey block. He can’t live in a world where Angus MacGyver dies. 

“There’s no other way out.” Mac whispers, blood collecting at the corners of his cracking lips. “I...I need you to trust me. One of us has to die.” 

* * *

THEY’RE OUT OF OPTIONS

EVEN FOR MAC

“All of this is about you.” Mac flinches at the hurt look in Jack's eyes. He didn’t mean it to come out that way, didn’t mean to place blame, but he’s so tired and his head hurts and he’s hungry and thirsty and he can barely think. “Griggs wants you to be the one to suffer. If I’m dead, his game is over. He wants you to live with the guilt of killing me.” Mac wishes he sounded more sure of himself. His voice is cracking. 

“Doesn’t mean he ain’t just gonna walk out and leave me to starve.” 

“You’d die of dehydration first, technically…”

“Not my point, Mac.”

“Still, he’d probably just leave. If his game’s over, why would he want to stay around in this hole? Especially if it’s like the place he was kept prisoner. He’s got to be having some serious flashbacks, probably getting worse and worse.” Jack nods. “If I was him, I’d want to get out. And then once he’s gone you can find your way out. You probably only have to get past that next door. I can talk you through making enough thermite to get started...” 

“Mac, listen to me. We are getting out of here, and no one has to die. Except maybe the guy who put us in here.” Jack puts both hands on Mac’s shoulders. “You can’t be giving up on me. Look at this place, it’s basically a hardware store for you. Griggs has no idea who he put in here. I know you can get us outta here. I know it. Come on, think.”

Mac looks around the room.  _ I have a plan, I just need it to work...and not work...at the same time. _ He knows there’s no way Griggs is going to let them both walk out of here. And he knows Jack meant it when he said ‘You go kaboom, I go kaboom’. He won’t let Mac sacrifice himself to save Jack. So they need another way.

He walks over to the gas cylinders. He’s not sure why they were left in here. Clearly it was intentional for them to find this room eventually. He wonders if they have any connection to the Jakarta op, or if maybe there was another intent for them somewhere in Griggs’s plan. But he’s not going to worry too much about it, because he knows what he has to do. 

Building the giant crossbow-style battering ram is actually possibly the easiest part. Mac’s been making similar things, on a smaller scale, for years. And breaking windows with far too many of them, as Bozer’s mom was all too eager to point out. He hopes this one has enough power to get through the door. 

When the tank impacts the steel door and a dent appears, Jack is almost more excited than Mac. “It's working.” He picks up the tank and loads it back onto the carriage of the machine, pushing it back while Mac stretches the springs holding it. “It’s actually working.”

“Slowly, but yeah.” Mac carefully lines up the next shot. They have to hit the door in the same place each time, which will mean less times they need to keep doing this and wearing themselves out. “You know, it's actually kinetic energy stored in the metal limbs of the crossbow that fires the bolt, not the elasticity of the wires.”

Jack shakes his head. “Mac, that is cool, really cool. But save it for when we’re out of here any my brain is rested enough to comprehend the physics, okay?”

“You must be exhausted if you’re admitting you can  _ ever _ understand my creations,” Mac chuckles, letting the canister fly again and flinching at the heavy boom. “I thought you only liked hearing me talk about physics when you wanted to be bored to sleep.” 

Jack picks up the canister and brings it back again, panting. He tosses it down on the crossbow and begins leaning against it, shoving it back again.

Mac’s sweating, and the salty liquid running into his eyes  _ burns. _ He pauses for a second to wipe one hand across his face, and his weak grip on the tension springs comes loose. It feels like he’s watching in slow motion as the canister slams into Jack’s chest with the force they were using to break down the steel door. 

“Jack!” Mac screams, leaping to his feet and rushing around to where Jack is lying on the floor, groaning and wheezing.

“I can't breathe,” he chokes out. 

“I think the impact broke some of your ribs, maybe your sternum.” Mac’s hands hover, unwilling to touch anything, to risk making this worse. 

“I got a punctured lung.” Maybe it should be scary that Jack says it so clinically, but Mac’s fairly sure he’d do the same.  _ We’re too familiar with pain. _ But he thinks Jack’s taken a page out of his book and toned down the severity.

“Yeah, uh, yeah, actually, I think, I think it's I think it's worse than that. From what I'm hearing, it sounds like you may have lacerated your aorta.”

“What's that mean?” Jack asks, but Mac can tell from his face he already knows it’s not good. 

“It means that your lungs are gonna start filling up with blood, and you're gonna drown.”

“You can fix me.” The absolute trust in Jack’s wide brown eyes rips Mac’s own heart apart. “I trust you to fix me.” 

“I'm gonna be right back.” Mac hurries around the room, moving things, pushing things aside, searching, praying desperately that his brain will start working and let him think of a plan. “Okay. I got to make a bore needle.”

“Okay.”

“No, not okay. No, uh, needle. Maybe I can, uh, use a shard of that bowl to open your chest.” Mac smashes the dish that was holding the Sago worms on the floor and picks up a piece. 

He leans down over Jack, listening to the bubbling gasps. 

“No, no, it won’t work. I'm not gonna do that.” He sits back on his heels, eyes flicking rapidly around and around the room, unwilling to accept the truth. But he has to. “There's nothing here! Damn it!”

“Mac, please.” Jack reaches for his hand. “I know. I know what you can use.”

“What?” 

Jack nods shakily to the gun they’ve laid aside in the far corner. “You can use that. You can use that. Please.”

“Absolutely not.” Mac is crying now, tears trickling down his cheeks, burning from the dehydration. They splatter over Jack’s hand and caved-in chest. 

“One lives, one dies. Come on. Mac, I-I'm dying.”

“You can't expect me to do that.” Mac chokes. He feels like the one drowning in blood. He’ll deserve to drown in Jack’s if he shoots him.

“Mac. This isn’t your fault. Please, don’t let the last thing I do be for nothing. You gotta survive, you gotta get out of here. This is on me, Griggs is on me, and I can’t let you dying be on me too. Shoot me.”

“I can’t.”

“Come on, man. Do this for me, please. Please.” Jack twists his fingers into Mac’s. “I’m ready.”

Mac sobs harder as he reaches for the gun. It shakes in his hands, he hates them, hates using them, and now he has to shoot Jack with it.  _ This can’t be happening.  _

“I'm so sorry,” Jack says softly, groaning. “I’m so sorry to make you do this kiddo.” But Mac knows he has to be the one to do it. There’s no guarantee Jack’s hands will be steady enough to pull the trigger and do it right. Then again, there’s no guarantee Mac’s will be either. 

“Just do it!” Jack shouts. 

Mac closes his eyes and pulls the trigger. 

* * *

MATTY’S OFFICE

RILEY DOESN’T BARGE IN UNLESS IT’S AN EMERGENCY

LIKE NOW

“Riley. Please tell me this is good news,” Matty says, looking up from the papers on her desk. There are deep purple shadows under her eyes.

Riley’s half afraid she’s going to wake up and this is going to be a dream, that Mac and Jack will still be missing without any trace. So she forges on while the hope and adrenaline are still in her body. 

“It is. Even though we didn’t have sat view of the area the accident happened  _ when _ it happened, we do know why.” Riley says. “The data was from a CIA satellite, an it was coming in corrupted, remember?”

Matty nods. 

“I had an algorithm running on it, and it finally spit out a result. The data isn’t actually corrupted. It’s encrypted. With a CIA code I haven’t seen since the first few months I started there.” Riley says. “I’m running decryption now, but I need you to call the field office that satellite was tasked to and find out who could have tampered with it in the last twenty-four hours.”

Riley paces while Matty makes her calls.  _ At least now we know why they picked a remote location for the grab. Someplace no one would pay too much attention to a sat feed that wasn’t working too well. _ She jumps at the click when Matty hangs up the phone. 

“There were six agents who accessed the satellite coding with an administrative login. But only one of them is connected to Jack,” Matty says. “Jason Griggs. He and his partner and Jack ran an op in Jakarta when Jack was a junior agent. Things went sideways, Jack was ordered to complete his objective and bail, and Griggs turned up six months later in a torture cell, seriously injured and without his partner. When he was recovered enough to give a debrief, we found out Hadley had died a month before the rescue team got there.” 

“And he blames Jack for following orders and leaving them there to suffer.” Riley’s heard the vague details of the story, she knows that’s the reason Jack tends to prioritize people over the mission.  _ Orders are what caused that disaster. He won’t let it happen again.  _ “That’s got to be who took them.” she sets her rig down on Matty’s desk and begins typing rapidly. Now that she knows what she’s looking for, getting a CIA location signal shouldn’t be a problem. 

“Can you track his phone?”

Riley holds up her rig. “Already done. I don’t have a current signal, he was smart enough to ditch the phone before he pulled this off, but one of the last places it pinged was this site. A former cold war blacksite that was supposed to be decommissioned eight years ago.”

“And only about fifty miles from the accident site.” Matty says. “Okay, Riley, get a tac team and get ready to hit that location.”

She nods. It feels strange to be the one who’s going to lead a rescue assault team, that’s normally Jack’s job. But she gets out her phone and calls anyway, already on her way to the locker room to grab her own tac suit. 

She makes sure to request triage medical agents on the strike team. There’s no telling how badly off Mac and Jack already are.  _ But I have to keep believing they’re alive. That’s all that’s keeping me on my feet right now. _

* * *

Mac crumples to the floor next to Jack’s still body, the gun still in his hand. 

_ I’m so sorry Jack.  _

He swallows a sob. The hand holding the gun shakes. He doesn’t need another bullet in it. There are a hundred ways to die just in this room. He should know. He knew what he was going to do with the meager things he was allowed in solitary, if he ever felt like it had to come to that. 

_ Jack said that’s what happened to...to the me he saw in a world where he didn’t exist. _ Maybe not exactly that way. But Mac hadn’t survived without Jack there for him. And he’s not sure he can in this world either. 

He did what he had to do. That’s what he has to tell himself. Still, guilt crushes in his chest as badly as that gas cylinder smashed Jack’s. 

The door opens, creaking and groaning even harder against the bowing caused by the gas cylinder’s impact. Mac slowly pulls himself to his feet and turns to face a man with a scarred face and a gun in his hand. The man glances from Mac to Jack’s body on the floor. “Well, I must say. That was...unexpected.” 

Mac drags in a shaky breath. “I didn’t want to do it.” The words ring hollow and bitter in his mouth.  _ But you did it anyway. _

“You know, you were actually so close to freedom.” Griggs pats the structure of the crossbow with an approving glance.“I underestimated you, MacGyver. I’d heard the stories, yes. But they didn’t do you justice.”

“And Jack told me you used to be a good man.” Mac spits back. “That didn’t do you justice either.”

“Oh, I was. Once. Until he left us for dead.” The venom in his voice makes Mac shudder.

“He thought you were dead. He hated himself every day for leaving, and I know he never stopped thinking about what happened. He wished he could do it over again. Save you. He didn’t deserve to be punished like this when he was already punishing himself.”

“They told everyone that Samrozi killed Hadley.” The man’s voice is cold. “It looked good in the papers. More reasons to believe we were all doing the right thing. More reasons to say this is why black ops are needed, because monsters like Samrozi were out there. They didn’t want the world to know the truth. That a sadistic terrorist didn’t kill an American agent. That one of their own did.” Griggs looks down at the gun in his hand. “He did everything he could to break us. And he won. Only after I gave up hope did Samrozi offer a way out.”

“One lives, one dies,” Mac says softly.

“I thought I could be strong, but I broke. And I shot Hadley. I killed my best friend so that I could live. And now, so have you.” Griggs shakes his head. “It would have been so much better for Dalton to have been standing over your cold corpse. He’s the one I wanted to suffer.” The smile is maniacal. Unhinged. No wonder this man shot his partner. Mac can see the insanity glittering in his eyes.  _ He isn’t Murdoc. But he’s just as twisted, in his own way. _

Mac knows firsthand what desperation and misery can shatter in someone. He wasn’t tortured like Griggs, but he experienced his own kind of hell, for both his two years in prison and his three months with Murdoc. And he knows it irretrievably damaged him. But not to the point where he would ever be willing to kill. 

He looks the man in the eyes. “Sorry to disappoint you. But Jack Dalton is a better man than you will ever be.” 

He sees the man’s eyes widen on the ‘is’, but Griggs doesn’t have time to wonder what Mac means, because the next second a spatter of blood explodes on his shoulder, and he yells, dropping the gun, which Jack snatches as he leaps to his feet.

“How…” Griggs asks. 

“Damn. I didn’t think I was that good an actor,” Jack says. “Hey Mac, I think maybe when we go home I oughta try for a career in Hollywood. Mac?”

Mac wants to laugh at Jack’s humor, but the world is spinning, and getting so dark...

* * *

_ Playing dead hurts. _ Jack’s chest is only bruised, nothing’s broken, but watching Mac fake…(or maybe not fake, the poor kid’s been off his meds for a day and a half, is severely dehydrated, and could be hallucinating for all Jack knows) absolute desperation feels like it did rip his heart apart.

He keeps one hand over the bag of blood against his chest, and uses the other to momentarily feel for the zip gun tucked under their crossbow, just in case.  _ Pipe, compressed bed spring, and a bullet that, when removed from its shell, gave us a nice blank to use for my fake death. _

He wonders if him being the one to die was the wrong move. He didn’t want to have to fake shoot Mac, didn’t want the kid to have to watch him stand over him and pull the trigger. But making Mac do it might be just as cruel. 

Still, he thinks him dying will throw off Griggs’s plan.  _ In his own mind, the man sees me as a heartless monster who abandoned him and Hadley to save my own neck. He probably expects that I’ll shoot Mac so I can walk out of here. He’s very likely counting on it. _ So this is the play. 

And it works. Perfectly. Griggs is just enough off his game to get sloppy, to not check carefully that Jack really isn’t still alive. Which is when Jack fires the zip gun and takes the man to the floor. 

He feels a lot less elated at their success when Mac’s body goes boneless and he collapses to the ground. The kid’s been running on adrenaline and it looks like he just ran out. Jack collects Griggs’s gun, ignoring the man’s pained groans.  _ I shot you non-fatally on purpose. You don’t deserve to get an easy way out, but more than that, it’s not what you need. You need help.  _

“Hey, hey, kiddo.” Jack lifts Mac gently into his arms. “We’re gonna get you home.”

Mac twists a little so he can look up at Jack.  _ At least he’s still sort of awake. _ His words come slow and thick around parched lips and a swollen tongue. “What about him?” 

“He can wait.” Jack says. He stumbles down the hallway to a small room where the door is ajar. He steps inside, and there’s a cot, a bank of radio and radar equipment, and a beat up first aid kit hanging on the wall. He lays Mac down on the cot, plumping the thin pillow enough to slide under his head, and then begins scrounging around the room for anything he can use to help the kid. 

“Ohh man yep, I was right. This is one of the old CIA bunkers, and all this stuff is still active.”

“I feel like we’re in a Fallout game,” Mac mumbles lazily from the cot.

“Dude, I didn’t know you played.”

“Riley plays. And she got Bozer started.” Mac shrugs. “It’s kind of fun.”

“Figures, you’d like the game about surviving a nuclear wasteland. Hey, how come you weren’t referencing it all over when we were in Chernobyl?”

“You were too busy talking about the X-men.”

“Oh. Right. Well, anyway…” Jack holds up a radio mic. “This crap is ancient, but it’s still probably up to transmitting. Which means I should be able to get a message to the CIA, who can relay it to Matty.” He switches on the radio, but all he gets is painful static. “Or, you know, not right now.”

“I can fix that,” Mac says, sitting up and immediately swaying, leaning back against the thin mattress again.

“Hey, easy. Let’s get you perked up first, don’t want you accidentally blowing us up,” Jack says. He smiles when his search yields a case of bottled water. He unscrews the cap of one and walks back over, sitting down next to Mac. 

“Small sips, kiddo. Small sips.” Jack tilts Mac’s head up to let him drink. “Good thing this dude was prepared.”

“Enough to at least wait to watch us die,” Mac says. 

“Hey, hey, don’t be morbid  _ now. _ We’re gonna get out of here just fine,” Jack says. “Get some rest, and then when you’re feeling up to it, we’ll fix the radio.”

He lets Mac lie down, and then grabs the first aid kit and goes back to their cell. He patches up Griggs’s shoulder, then ties the man up, ignoring his pained protests when he pulls the injured man’s arms behind his back.  _ You could have hurt me and I would have deserved it. But you hurt my kid, and that I can’t let slide. _

By the time he’s done, he’s exhausted. He barely makes it back to the little command room before he collapses. He takes a couple sips from the half-empty bottle before his head lolls to the side and his world goes dark.

He’s woken up by lights and shouting and a hand on his face.

“Jack!” It’s Riley’s voice. 

“Riles?” Jack asks blearily. “Wha...how...Mac, you fix the radio?”

“Didn’ hafta,” Mac slurs. He’s being carefully lifted from the bunk and loaded onto a gurney. “They found us anyway.”

“You think we were gonna let you die on us when we just got you back?” Riley asks. “We’ve got Griggs in custody, he’s going to be tested to see if he’s mentally fit to stand trial. And you and Mac are going home.” 

“Sounds good to me.” Jack starts to stand up, and then sways dangerously on his feet. Riley tucks an arm under his shoulder, her own stiff with layers of tac gear. 

“Come on. Let’s go home.” 

* * *

PHOENIX MEDICAL

Mac glowers at the IV line still running down into the back of his hand. The doctors are insisting on keeping him another day to make sure that he won’t have a delayed reaction to the dehydration, and that his medication kicks in properly again. He can feel the difference already, his head is clearer, the pain is all but gone, and he doesn’t feel like he’s going to scream or cry in the next few seconds. Then again, not being trapped inside a concrete box watching Jack die in front of him probably helps with that too.

The curtain around his room is pushed open, and Jack himself steps in, smiling. “How you feeling, kiddo?”

“Ready to get out of here. I’ve been trapped long enough.” Mac gives him a wry smile. 

“I know. But they just wanna make sure you’re okay. If it’s any consolation, I’ll stay till you have to go home. I promise.”

“Will you wear a hospital gown and let them put in an IV?” Mac asks. Jack gives a noncommittal shrug. “Then no, it’s not much consolation at all.” But he laughs anyway.

“Maybe this will be.” Jack places a small, badly wrapped box on the bed. “Riley got our suitcases back. The GTO is toast, but they didn’t get totally destroyed, and thankfully, this was still intact.”

Mac opens the wrapping paper and pulls out a small, narrow box, like a shirt box. Something papery rustles inside, and when he opens it, there’s a legal paper and a pen. The words are blurring in front of his tired eyes under the fluorescents, but he can make out the word ‘adoption’.

“What’s this?”

“Late Christmas present,” Jack says with a small smile. “You know how a lotta people get married in Vegas? I was kinda figuring maybe I could tell you I was gonna tell you I was gonna adopt you there.” 

“You’re kidding…”

“Nope. Riley showed me a picture she found online of some guy who adopted his stepson who was like twenty-five or something, and it got me thinking.” 

“You don’t think she was hinting something to you, do you?” Mac asks, smiling a little. “Like hurry up and propose to Diane so you can adopt  _ her? _ ”

“Oh, she probably was,” Jack chuckles. “Don’t worry, kiddo, we’ll get there. But since you’re kinda parentless at the moment…” He puts an arm around Mac’s shoulders. 

“But how did you get James to…” 

“Turns out people who don’t exist kinda forfeit their right to parental custody,” Jack says. “James MacGyver disappeared, and I don’t know exactly what legal mumbo-jumbo Penny had to wade through to get it all figured out, but turns out we don’t have to make him sign nothing.” he grins. “It’s gonna mean another trip to court, but this time no one’s gonna be carrying cuffs around you, so…”

“You’d do this for me?”

Jack nods. “Hell yeah. I’ve wanted to do it for a while now. If it’s what you want…”

“I do. I want it.” Mac says. 

Jack sits down on the bed next to Mac. “We almost ran out of time back there, and I almost died at Christmas. And I didn’t want to waste one more moment and miss you knowing how much you mean to me.”

Mac feels like he’s floating over the bed, staring at the papers in his hands. “Wait, does this mean we’re changing my last name to Dalton?”

“I think your name sounds fine as is, Carl’s Jr.,” Jack chuckles. “But if you ever want to use mine, go for it.”


	13. Fence+Suitcase+Americium-241

###  312-Fence+Suitcase+Americium-241

MAC’S HOUSE

HE’S SPENT A LOT MORE TIME HERE LATELY

Mac curses under his breath in frustration as the metal dog dish falls out of his hand to the floor, making a truly horrific clatter. Mickey begins barking sharply at the sound, and Mac hears Jack rustling around in his room.  _ I wanted to let him sleep in. _

“Hey hoss, you okay out there?” Jack asks. 

“Yeah. Just trying to feed Mickey and dropped the dish again.”

_ At least it wasn’t full. _ Mac’s grateful for small miracles these days. 

The trauma from their accident and kidnapping seems to have re-aggravated his head injury. He’s lucky if he makes it through a day without headaches, even on his medications. Even luckier if he doesn’t suddenly lose grip strength and drop things. He’s only using plastic plates at this point, he’s not taking chances. 

The doctors say it could be trauma related and that it might clear up. But it’s been a few weeks now. And he knew it was possible his condition could deteriorate.  _ A head injury like that...I might be going downhill and I’ll never come back from it. _ The thought scares him, so he tries not to think about it. But that’s hard to do when every headache, every clumsy movement, is a reminder of how damaged he is. 

“Hey, it’s okay. I’ll take care of it,” Jack says. He steps out, still in the AC/DC t-shirt he sleeps in and a pair of faded sweatpants. 

“I can do it. I’m not an invalid,” Mac snaps, and it comes out more harshly than he intended. 

“I know, Mac.” Jack’s voice is gentle. Patient. He takes the bowl out of Mac’s hands carefully. “But you’re still healing, so let me help you for now, okay?” 

“It’s not fair,” Mac whispers under his breath.

“No, I know it’s not, hoss.”  _ I didn’t think Jack would hear me _ . But that was a foolish hope because Jack hears everything. “Believe me, if I could trade places with you I’d do it in a heartbeat.”

_ I didn’t mean it to come out like that... _ Mac swallows. “I didn’t mean I’m jealous you’re healing faster.” He swallows thickly. “I...I don’t even know what I meant.”

“That’s okay. I know this is hard.”

“You don’t know!” Mac sobs suddenly. His emotions are all messed up again too, and he can’t even tell whether he’s sad or angry or just...tired. “You have no idea what it’s like to...to not be able to make things work the way they should! To not…” He looks down at his shaking hands. “I just got this back, and now I might lose it all again, forever.”

Jack sighs. “Mac, I know better than you think I do.” He reaches into his pocket and pulls out something. Mac frowns.  _ Reading glasses? _

“I bought these at the store yesterday when I went for groceries. Finally broke down and admitted to myself I needed ‘em after I gave myself a headache reading on the couch last night.” Mac remembers seeing Jack rubbing his forehead and wincing. He’d had a headache of his own, so he hadn’t been paying too much attention. But he’d noticed. “Mac, I’m a sniper. I need my eyes sharp. And they ain’t what they were ten years ago, five years ago...hell, even last year. Sooner or later, they’re gonna fail me, and that part of my life, that part of my skill set, is gone.” 

Mac crams a fist in his mouth to choke back a sob.  _ I’m so selfish. _ “I’m sorry, Jack, I’m sorry. I just say things without thinking.” And maybe that’s the worst part of all. Not the tremors, not the headaches. The inability to keep up the walls he’s hidden behind his whole life. Saying things he wishes never left his mouth. “I’m broken. I’m sorry.” 

“Hey, hey. Kiddo. It’s okay. It’s okay.” Jack’s hands are steady on his shoulders. “You’re not broken, Mac.”

“Yes I am.” He twists away to look Jack in the eyes. “I  _ am _ broken, and I have to learn to live with that. It’s okay. I’ve done it before.”  _ I knew after the first man attacked me in prison my life was never ever going to be the same again, no matter what happened after that.  _ He still wishes things were different, but wishes can’t change the past. Can’t erase trauma. 

“Well, I don’t care if you are or not. Okay?” Jack brushes hair out of Mac’s eyes and tears he didn’t realize were falling off his cheeks. “I could not love you any more or less whatever the circumstances, whoever and wherever we were, Mac. You could be...an alien and I’d still be proud to call you my son.” 

Mac half laughs, half snorts, through his tears. “An alien?”

“Sure. Mac, you could be anything and I’d still care. That’s why I adopted you.” Jack pulls Mac into a gentle hug. “I love you and nothing is ever going to change that. I know you think you have to walk on eggshells around parents, that you can’t ever upset them or they’ll stop loving you. But that’s James’s fault and he was a shitty excuse for a human being, let alone a dad. So listen to me, not him, when I tell you you’re not going to make me mad and you’re not going to drive me away.” 

Mac swallows, feeling tears still streaming down his cheeks.  _ The only unfair thing is that we didn’t find each other sooner. _

“You got another appointment today, right?” Jack says. “Maybe they’ll have good news.”

Mac nods. 

“So let’s keep hoping, huh?” Jack asks. 

“Sounds good to me.”

* * *

THE PHOENIX FOUNDATION

RILEY IS ITCHING TO GET BACK IN THE FIELD

Riley loves her computers. She does. But spending two weeks doing nothing but digital surveillance is wearing pretty thin. She knows this intel is vitally important, that once she manages to put all the pieces together and crack the encryption on the data transfers they’ll be able to pin down nine sleeper cells on the Eastern Seaboard, but it’s mentally and physically exhausting.

Still, a field op wouldn’t feel right without Mac and Jack, and they’re just finishing the last week of their injury leave. Mac in particular was in rough shape after the kidnapping. The head trauma wasn’t good on top of the existing damage, and his recovery has been slow and halting. The time she spent at the house was a mixture of watching Mac frustratedly try to do things, and Jack saving most items from falling to the floor. 

But it sounds like Mac’s finally making progress. And oddly enough, it’s thanks to Jack making him help cook in the kitchen.  _ Mac has never been a good cook.  _ Riley remembers the few dinners at the house when Bozer wasn’t there, and the meal had been nothing more than some hastily prepared salad and sliced fruit. And the air had always smelled a little smoky. 

_ I know it wasn’t because he’s not aware of how to cook. But according to Jack, as soon as something goes the slightest bit wrong he freezes. Because of James and his insistence on perfection. _ And freezing up when a pot is boiling over is definitely not good.

Bozer claims he tried for years without success to get Mac to cook. But apparently it took one father figure to undo the damage the last one did. Jack claims that Mac can actually cook a full Texas-style spread now, and he’s going to have them all over for dinner this weekend and prove it. Riley looks forward to it.  _ We can celebrate them both clearing their recert physicals, and find out whether Jack’s overselling Mac’s culinary improvements or not. _

Riley rubs a hand over her face, blinking and taking a moment to look away from her computer bank in the tech lab and focus on something across the room. Which happens to be the window to the parking lot. Riley glances out, only vaguely paying attention to what she’s seeing, until one figure walking toward the building catches her attention. She jumps up, locking her monitors but leaving the decryption program running, and hurries to the front desk, wanting to make sure she did see what she thought. 

There’s a very familiar face walking through the front doors of the Phoenix. Riley still can’t remember what Sarah’s married name is. She’s always going to be Sarah Adler to her. 

“Sarah?” Riley asks. “What’s going on?”

“I got a promotion. I’m managing field teams now. And one of mine is in trouble.” Sarah’s eyes are wide with worry. Riley frowns. “I’ll tell you all about it in the briefing.”

“Briefing?” Riley asks.

“Might want to check your phone,” Matty says, walking up. “I understand this is short notice, but this case is time-sensitive.” Riley glances at her phone, it’s been on silent. But there is a text from Matty. And it’s also been sent to Mac, Jack, Bozer, and Leanna. 

Riley grabs her rig and settles down in the War Room. It’s not long before Bozer appears, followed by Leanna. Mac and Jack take a little longer to show up. Riley knows they were down in the gym practicing some sparring, and she can tell both are slightly out of breath, and Mac’s hair is damp. He’s tugging on the collar of his workout t-shirt. It’s lower than most of the shirts he wears normally in the office, and the scars on his neck from Murdoc’s collar are visible peeking out from under his hair. Riley can tell he’s trying to keep the neck from falling low enough to show the tips of the scarred ‘M’ on his chest. 

“Sarah,” Jack says, suddenly looking at lot more self-conscious about his own sweaty appearance. He tries and fails to sniff at his shirt surreptitiously. “How have you been?”

“Fine. And you?” Sarah asks. Riley can tell they’re both still a little stiff with each other. Time has softened things only a little. 

“Trying to keep the kids out of trouble,” Jack says, with a small smile. “I’m mostly succeeding.”

The joke doesn’t pull as much of a smile out of Sarah as Jack’s normally can.  _ Whatever this is, it’s bad. _

“Well, since I don’t think you flew all the way to LA to discuss our personal lives, what brings you here?” Jack asks. 

Sarah nods to Matty, and the picture of a red-haired woman who looks vaguely familiar to Riley flashes up on the screen. 

Matty starts speaking, since it looks like Sarah is taking a moment to collect her paperwork. “Charlotte Coal is a deep cover CIA agent who’s gone off the grid completely. The agency has authorized us to insert our own agent in her place to finish her current mission.”

“I remember her,” Jack says. “She was a long term covers operator. One of the best.”

Sarah nods sadly. “She was. But official CIA position is that Coal has flipped. Her family has vanished from their safe house; and since only Coal and her handler were aware of its location, the assumption is that she took them with her and has gone on the run.”

“And you don’t think she did,” Mac says. 

“I’ve known Charlie Coal a long time,” Sarah says. “We trained together for field ops. I would have trusted her with my life. But I’m also well aware that the most skilled deep cover agents are very very good at winning people over and appearing to be something they’re not. I’m too emotionally involved to try and track her down myself, so I came to you. Officially, you’re being handed the op she bailed on. Unofficially...I want to know if one of my closest friends lied to me for over a decade.” 

Riley swallows hard, remembering Nick. What it felt like to find out that a person you thought you knew wasn’t who you thought they were at all.  _ At least Sarah has the good judgement to let someone else handle it. I was an idiot and kept sticking my nose back into the case because apparently I liked torturing myself with it. _

“The only clue I have that this isn’t what they’re saying is this message,” Sarah says. “Before she went dark, Coal send an encrypted transmission to me as the supervising senior agent.” She opens the email on the War Room screen. It’s two lines of text. 

**Ladybird, ladybird fly away home.**

**Your house is on fire, your children are gone.**

“We don’t know what the intent of the message was. It seems to relate to her family’s disappearance, but I can’t imagine why, if she was the one taking them, she would send us a message about it.”

“So you think there are other factors in play?” Leanna asks.

“I think we need to keep that in mind.” 

Jack nods. “So Coal may or may not have disappeared of her own free will. What was she involved in when she dropped off the grid?”

“Coal was looking to bring in and flip a high-value target known as the Fence.” Sarah pulls up a photo-less dossier. “He has the honor of landing on almost every intelligence service's wish list. The Fence has made it a priority to remain completely anonymous. We have no photos of him, no voice recordings, nothing. All we know is that he hires high-line thieves for one-off jobs to steal valuable items, then he funnels the profits to over a dozen terrorist groups.”

Matty jumps in. “If the CIA could get their hands on him, they’d have the ability to trace several organizations and independent operators he supplies with weapons and supplies.” 

“Ohh. I’ve heard rumors about this guy,” Jack says. “Very paranoid. Only meets with his suppliers once he’s confirmed they’re legit. It’s hard to score a face to face.”

“Which is exactly why Coal has been working this cover for three years,” Sarah says. “She’s established herself as a cat burglar, code-named Freya, specializing in high security corporate break-ins. And three days ago she was contacted to do a job for the Fence. But she dropped off the grid before the meeting date, and if we don’t go through with the op, all those years of work are for nothing.” 

“So what’s our play?” Jack asks.

“Riley.” Sarah says. Riley looks up, startled. “The Fence and his crew have no idea what Coal looks like. She always wore a mask when doing her jobs. So Riley could to take her place and go ahead with the meet as scheduled. Since we don’t know who to trust in the CIA right now, reaching out to an outside agency was our best chance of pulling this off, and I know this team is the best there is.”

It’s flattering to hear that, but Jack clearly isn’t feeling very honored. He looks more concerned. “If the CIA has a mole, won’t the Fence know who he’s working with?” Jack asks. “If someone gave him the location of the safe house…”

“Kidnapping isn’t the Fence’s style,” Sarah replies. “He knows that to stay in business he has to keep people happy and make them want to work for him. So he pays well and keeps his nose clean; better for business. If someone took her family, it wasn’t him.” 

Jack doesn’t look convinced. Riley doesn’t blame him.  _ When it’s my life on the line he gets paranoid. Wants all the bases covered.  _ “And what if Coal did go dark? If she’s making a deal with the Fence on her own?” Jack asks. “Good agents have flipped for a lot less money. And if she’s already cut a deal, we’ll be outed the second Riley gives her name.”

“Riley won’t go in alone. Coal was part of a four-man crew,” Sarah says. “Your team should be perfect stand-ins. Coal’s former teammates have been pulled off the op, and they’re being interviewed as we speak to find out if any of them know anything about her disappearance. But so far, it sounds like they’re as confused as the rest of the agency.” 

“So we walk into this meeting, slap some cuffs on our man, and then squeeze him for all the info he’s got?” Jack says. “Sounds straightforward.” 

“We won’t get a face to face until we have the item he’s contracting for in hand,” Sarah says. “The Fence always inspects his purchases in person.”

“So we have to steal this item and bring it to a meet, and then we grab him?” Bozer says. 

Sarah nods. “That’s the simplified version, but yes, Bozer. And once we have him in hand, I’ll take him to the CIA for interrogation.” 

“And we’re just going to hope we scoop your agent up along the way?” Mac asks.

Matty nods. “The mission takes priority. Find Coal if you can, but if you can’t, get the men she was sent to find.” 

Riley nods. She knows how this works.  _ No single agent is more important than the mission. That’s what we all signed on for, and that’s what we hope happens if something happens to us. We hope we didn’t die in vain. _ She can’t explain why, but like Sarah, she’s sure Charlotte Coal hasn’t gone dark.  _ My instincts have been wrong before, and badly, but... _ Riley knows the woman only by reputation, but she doesn’t think Coal is the type to drag her family into a life on the run. 

_ Something bad happened. To all of them. And we might be their last chance. _ And even though Riley knows their first priority has to be the Fence, she grabs her rig before leaving the War Room and starts Friar scanning anything they can access for a match to Coal or any of the family members in her file. Just in case. 

* * *

THE PHOENIX FOUNDATION

JACK NEVER GOT THE CHANCE TO GIVE SARAH A REAL TOUR

“I’m honestly surprised  _ you _ don’t have one of these offices by now,” Sarah says with a chuckle as Jack leads her along the administration corridors.

“You know me. I’m at my best in the field. Not behind a desk.” She nods. Taking her own promotion was a hard decision.  _ Like Jack, I love the field. But unlike him, I don’t think that’s where I want to spend the rest of my life. _ But ever since she married Jeff, she’s been more and more conscious that every time she goes into the field could be her last. 

_ He knows enough to know that what I do is dangerous, and he married me in spite of that. But... _ At first she thought it would be easier. Now she can’t bear the thought of breaking his heart.  _ I didn’t think I was the type to get so sentimental. But I guess I am. _

Besides, if she ever decides she wants that family she turned down with Jack, it would be nice to have a regular schedule and be home a little more frequently. Not that she has that in the plans any time soon, but it’s a consideration. 

“So, you’re just going to keep working in the field until you rust out or burn out?” She asks with a small chuckle.

“Oh, I think with my team, it’ll be more of a blaze of glory,” Jack says. “Mac is no less likely to start blowing things up.”

Sarah chuckles, the first time she met him he set a dozen crates of ammunition on fire with a magnifying glass and a car mirror. 

“He’s doing alright?” She was part of the push in the CIA to send help for the search for him last year. Finding out what had happened, even the picked-through details Phoenix finally circulated to the other agencies, was horrifying.  _ I can only imagine what Jack’s gone through. _

“He’s getting there. Had a rough time a few weeks ago when one of your guys decided revenge was a dish best served cold, but he’s improving.” 

Sarah winces but nods. She heard about Griggs.  _ I knew he was unstable. That’s why he was riding a desk. But I never thought he’d snap so badly.  _ “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry.”

“Wasn’t your agent who went off the deep end,” Jack says. 

“It still could be.” She looks up at him. 

“I don’t know Charlotte Coal nearly as well as you do. But she doesn’t sound like the type to suddenly throw away a whole career. She’s smart, she’d know that doing something like that means being hunted for the rest of your life.” 

“She’s also a trained deep cover operative. The CIA taught her to disappear.”

“That’s exactly what I mean,” Jack says. “You remember our training. And you remember that one of the biggest uncontrollable variables in an undercover is people who know your real identity being part of the op. Taking her whole family with her would be a gigantic risk. Those kids are young, too young to be trusted to keep a secret well. You know kids, they’ll say  _ anything _ . And she has to know that.” 

Sarah nods. “I want to believe that. I want to look at this evidence and say she’s innocent. But I don’t dare hope and be wrong.”

Jack shakes his head. “One thing I’ve learned, Sarah, is that hoping is never the wrong thing to do.” 

She nods. “I hope you’re right.”

“I’m always right, Sarah, you know that.”

“No, Jack, that’s my job.” Sarah chuckles.

“Well, let’s go get your team ready.” Jack says. “Labs and tac rooms are this way.” 

It feels strange to think that for this mission, this team  _ is _ her team. The op to bring down the Fence is still hers, she’s been cleared of any potential connection to the disappearance of Charlotte or her family already. And yet it feels strange that for the first time, she and Jack won’t be on a mission as equals. She’ll be giving the orders, Jack will be...well, probably arguing with them, truth be told. But she also knows Jack well, and she knows how to work with him. This will either go very well or be an unqualified disaster. She isn’t sure which. 

When she and Jack walk into the lab, the rest of the team is already there. Bozer’s arguing with Mac about something that sounds like it’s to do with a movie, but not one Sarah’s ever seen a box office poster for, and Bozer’s adding to his argument by waving around a paintbrush. Riley’s sitting on the edge of a desk, laughing at their antics and tapping away on her rig. Leanna is standing with her arms folded and head tilted like she’s refereeing the argument.

“All I’m saying is, Mac, the full neck makeup would have worked.”

“Bozer. You’re adding a burn scar with Phoenix-level tech. Not gills with super-glue and tapioca.”

Sarah glances at Jack.

“Don’t ask,” Jack mutters. “Bozer’s an amateur filmmaker. Or was, at least. And he roped Mac into most of his projects.”

She grins, looking back at the two.

“It definitely wasn’t going to last in water,” Mac is adding, looking almost pleading. 

“Yes it was. You just wouldn’t try it because you didn’t want to wear the tail.”

“No, I didn’t! It looked  _ creepy. _ ” Mac shudders.

“Tail?” Sarah finally ventures to ask.

Leanna chuckles. “Apparently Bozer was making a merpeople movie and wanted to use Mac in it, and he refused for a plethora of reasons, but I think we’re finally getting somewhere. The reaction to the tail was genuine horror.”

“Stop trying to be Cage,” Mac says.

“I was the top of my class for interrogation,” Leanna says. “This is all me.” She turns to Bozer. “So what exactly was this horrifying monstrosity of a tail like?” 

“Um...It was blue with a split fluke fin...wait, I still have it somewhere. It’s gotta be in my old boxes in the garage.”

“You  _ kept  _ it?” Mac practically screeches. “Why?”

“I happen to be very proud of that tail.” Bozer puffs out his chest.

“How did this even start?” Sarah whispers to Riley.

“Bozer was killing time working on a disguise for an undercover agent in Morocco,” Riley says. “This is actually a tame conversation, compared to some. Boze made some  _ weird _ movies.” She shakes her head. “But we’re ready to roll. All of us have picked up everything we need.” She pats a duffel bag and a suit bag hanging over the edge of the desk beside her. “We’re just waiting on Jack getting fitted for the suit he’ll borrow.”

“Consider me gone,” Jack says.

“Good, because I think Sue’s getting impatient,” Riley calls after him. 

Sarah glances at Leanna, the only one who isn’t picking up bags or carrying new clothes. Instead, she’s sitting down at a desktop computer. “I’m currently CIA affiliated, so I don’t want to compromise anything by joining the team. I’m going to stay behind and comb through the intel and try to find out who could have found out about Coal’s house and family.” 

Sarah hands her a flashdrive. “This is the video surveillance of the safe house, it was knocked out at the time the Coal family vanished, but you might be able to learn something from the backlog.” 

Riley nods. “Good luck, Leanna.”

“You too.” 

Riley just nods, picking up her gear. 

“Are you ready for this?” Sarah asks. “I’m sorry to spring such a big op on you without warning. But you’re the best agent I can think of to do this.”

Riley gives her a smile. “I’ve got this.” Sarah knows that Riley’s the youngest agent to make it to the top field level in Phoenix.  _ She had a good teacher.  _ People tend to underestimate Riley, probably much the same way Sarah’s been underestimated her whole career.  _ Being asked to head up such an important op is probably a big thing for her. It would have been for me at her age. _ “And...I promise we’ll do whatever we can to find Charlotte Coal as well. I’m already running a search for her and her family.”

“I appreciate that,” Sarah says. “And that you all haven’t jumped to the same conclusions as the CIA.” 

“I don’t know what to think, even though I’m willing to give Coal the benefit of the doubt,” Riley admits, her voice low. “Because I’ve been betrayed by people I thought I could trust completely.”

Sarah nods.  _ I remember the op we ran together right after Riley found out Nick was supposedly working for the Organization.  _ She’d seen the raw edges, the anger, the lack of control. Riley had been devastated and spiraling. 

“But I’ve also had my family used against me. My mom was kidnapped when I was still with the CIA, by someone trying to blackmail me into hacking the NSA. I was absolutely terrified. I would have done anything they asked to keep my mom safe and alive. And I can’t begin to imagine what it would feel like to have your children threatened.” 

Sarah nods. “You know why Jack and I broke up?”

“You said something about he wanted kids and you weren’t ready?” Riley asks.

“This is why. I don’t want to bring a family into this business,” Sarah says quietly. “Because if I do I will spend the rest of my career terrified of them being turned into pawns in a game against me. And if anything ever happened to them…” She swallows. “I’d never forgive myself.”

Riley nods slowly. “Jack worries about me because I’m like his daughter.” She smiles a little. “And he’s in the process of legally adopting Mac.”

“He never told me.” Sarah feels a strange surge of...something. She won’t call it jealousness, not exactly. It’s not about her. It’s just...she’s glad Jack is finally getting the family he dreamed of. It just doesn’t include her. And she’s made her peace with that. But somehow she’d just expected Jack to never change.

“Is he still dating your mom?” She asks.

Riley nods. “Does that bother you?”

“Not at all.”  _ Strangely it was less painful to hear he was dating than to hear he was adopting Mac.  _ “Are they happy?”

“I’m honestly a little surprised he hasn’t popped the question yet,” Riley says with a chuckle. “They’re head over heels.”

“Jack takes a long time to commit. I should know. But this time he might was to actually get his ass in gear and say something. I’d hate to watch him lose someone else he cared about. Especially when they might stand a chance.”

“I’ll be sure and tell him you said that,” Riley chuckles.

“Said what?” Jack asks, walking back inside with his suit over his arm. “You talking about me when I’m not here to defend myself?”

“Always,” Sarah says with a chuckle, and for a second it feels like the years have been erased, they’re back with the CIA, running ops together as junior agents.  _ But we’re not. We’ve changed. And on the whole, I think it’s for the best. _

* * *

ON THE WAY TO MEET THE FENCE

“I feel like Danny Ocean,” Jack says. His shoes are a little too tight, pinching a bit uncomfortably, but he only has to wear them a little longer anyway. Other than that, this suit is _nice._ _Glad I’m not renting it myself. That would have to be expensive._

“Technically, that’s my role,” Riley says, adjusting her own perfectly tailored suit jacket. “You’re more like Rusty.” 

“Always eating and wearing shirts that look like I stole them from Ted Nugent? I guess that makes me Brad Pitt, so I can get behind that.” He grins. “Does that mean I can walk into this meet eating a bag of potato chips?”

“No.”

“Dang, shouldn't have said that. Now I’m hungry.” Jack shakes his head. He knows Riley has snacks in the car somewhere, she always does, but he can’t afford to get something on this suit. Sue from Apparel Stock gets frustrated when teams bring back ripped or otherwise damaged. Usually because it’s irreparable or stained with blood. Most days the woman, in her pastel skirts and multicolored hair, is a cheerful ray of sunshine, but Jack has seen her frustrated side a few too many times. And knows she’s disturbingly capable with a pair of scissors. He’s pretty sure all the snacks Riley has will be cheese powder coated or otherwise damaging to black material. “Distract me. Who’s everyone else?”

Riley chuckles. “Well, we all know Mac is definitely our explosives expert. Basher.” 

Jack nods. “That was a given.” 

“Who am I?” Bozer asks, glancing at them in the rearview mirror. 

“Linus.” Jack and Riley say in total sync.

“Come on, really?” he groans. “I’m cooler than that. Way cooler than that. I should at least be Yen.” 

“You want to get lost in baggage claim?” Mac asks. Jack laughs. 

“We’re missing the brothers with the trucks,” Jack says. “I shoulda called Steve and Danny. They’d be great as bickering siblings.”

“We don’t actually need eleven people,” Riley says. 

“No, but it would be cool.” Jack grins. “Mac, we never made it to Vegas. What say we wrap this up and then…”

“No. Absolutely not. I’m not helping you rob a casino,” Mac says, shaking his head. 

“Okay, fine, be a stick in the mud. I’m sure Riley’s game for it.” 

Riley just rolls her eyes. “Jack, focus.”

“I am focusing. Getting all the silly stuff out of the way so I can be all business at the meet.” 

Riley gives him a fake glare. “Good, because we’re almost there. Time to finish coordinating with Sarah in the van.” Bozer pulls over, and Jack watches the van that’s been following them from Phoenix do the same. 

“I’ll go check in with Sarah, make sure her tech’s working.” Jack wants to talk to her alone. Something’s been off since he got back from picking up his suit. Sarah seemed to be shutting off from him again.  _ I thought we were really starting to get somewhere with moving forward with a friendship. _ It was easier when it was all texts and exchanged Christmas cards. But clearly seeing each other in person is as hard for Sarah as it is for Jack. 

He knocks on the door of the van and Sarah pulls it open, tugging headphones down from over her ears to rest around her neck. “Yes, Jack?”

“Sarah, you’re going to be listening to everything through those wireless bugs Mac designed. They’re tuned to the van’s radio so they shouldn’t raise eyebrows if we’re being monitored for anything sending out frequencies. Or something like that. Mac knows.” He shrugs.

“I’ve got all your signals loud and clear.  _ Ocean’s Eleven, _ Jack, really? You still can’t resist comparing everything to a movie, can you?”

“Nope.” He leans on the side of the van. “Hey, so, before we go meet this Fence dude’s people, I need to know something. I don’t like going into an op with secrets hanging over everything.”

“Jack, I already told you. I’m as sure as I can be that Riley is in no danger. I don’t think Coal was kidnapped by or cut a deal with the Fence.” Jack isn’t quite so certain of that, but he’s got his gun, his backup, and his backup-backup, and so does Riley. They’re as safe as they can be.

“It’s not about that. It’s about you and me and whatever’s eating you. You’ve been weird ever since Phoenix.” 

“Jack, it’s really not a good time.”

“I just want to know what’s bothering you.” Jack says. “I don’t like going into an op when the whole team isn’t one-hundred percent focused.”

“I am focused.”

“So telling me what was wrong shouldn’t be a problem, then.”

“Why didn’t you tell me you were adopting Mac?” Sarah asks.

_ Of anything it could be, I did not expect it to be that.  _ Jack wonders who told her. Maybe Mac, he’s pretty proud of the fact that Jack cares about him enough to want him as a son. Then again, Riley is pretty excited about it too. “I just...it...you didn’t want kids. And somehow, it felt...weird. To tell you about this.”

“It’s not going to change anything, Jack. We’ve both moved on. Or at least I hope we have. And I get that there’s always going to be some kind of ‘what ifs’ between us, but that shouldn’t mean we have to keep important pieces of our lives secrets.” 

Jack nods. “I guess some part of me knew that telling you I definitely have a kid now was admitting that we really were never meant to be. That we genuinely wanted different lives.” He gives her the ghost of a sad smile. “But that doesn’t mean we can’t still be friends.”

“I’m your boss, Dalton.” She says it mock-seriously, giving his shoulder a playful shove. “We can be ‘just friends’ after the mission is over. Right now, I’ve got seniority.”

“And you’re going to lord it over me this entire op, I see how it goes. See, this is the real reason I won’t take an office job. The power goes straight to your head.” 

“Jack!” 

“Okay, team, let’s go. Look alive,” Riley says. She’s come up behind Jack so quietly he didn’t realize she was there. “Meet’s in ten. And I don’t think being fashionably late will be acceptable.”

Jack nods and follows her back to the car. 

“How do I look?” Riley asks, brushing a hand over her suit one last time.

“Like a thief. In a good way.” Jack says. “Like a woman who knows what she wants.”

“Are you talking about me, or Sarah now?” Riley teases gently.

Jack gives her a grinning shake of his head.

“Okay, well, you’d better stop teasing me and get into character. I doubt Coal’s team got to joke with their boss on the job.”

“Not you too,” Jack mock-groans. “You and Sarah are both drunk on power today.” 

Riley chuckles. “You’re incorrigible, Jack.” 

* * *

MEET LOCATION

RILEY HOPES SHE LOOKS CONFIDENT

No matter how many times she walks into an undercover op, Riley always feels the same twist in her gut. The same fear that she’s going to make one wrong move, say one wrong thing, and it’s all going to blow up in her face. 

This time it’s a hundred times worse. The churning in her stomach is like one of Mac’s explosive mixtures. This isn’t  _ her _ undercover. She’s stepping into someone else’s shoes twice over. She didn’t get to make Charlotte Coal’s alter ego, the thief known to the criminal underworld only as the code name “Freya”, an allusion to the cat masks she and her crew wear whenever they make a heist. She has no idea of the correct mannerisms, the ways Coal established her character. She just has to jump in and hope for the best.

But pretending to be confident, pretending she’s got everything under control, is something Riley is very familiar with. So walking into the warehouse where they’re meeting the Fence’s representative, flanked by Jack, Mac, and Bozer, Riley knows she looks every inch the professional she’s pretending to be. 

She can hear Bozer humming some sort of upbeat pop song under his breath, and forces herself not to grin. It’s so...Bozer. 

There are three men at the far end of the garage, and she can tell from their stances that all of them are packing, and all of them are ready to draw their weapons at a moment’s notice. The two on the outer edges are definitely hired muscle, but judging by the quality of the suit the man in the center is wearing, he ranks higher in the Fence’s organization. He’s the one she’s here to meet.

Sure enough, the man in the middle steps forward as Riley’s team lines up behind her. She can feel Jack’s solid presence beside her, and it’s reassuring. As is Mac and Bozer’s support. Her family has her back, just in case this all goes sideways. 

“Freya.” The man smiles, but it’s a cold one. The kind that means she doesn’t have his trust yet, not by a long shot. “Your reputation precedes you.”

“As does your boss’s.” Riley keeps her tone neutral. A sort of professionalism that also says she’s feeling a tiny bit insulted that she doesn’t rate a meeting with the head honcho, as Jack would put it bluntly. 

“Well, then how he conducts his business is not going to be a surprise. The terms are non-negotiable.” The man’s voice allows for no argument. “This is a one time offer. I give you the details of the job, you pull it off. Once we acquire the goods, you're paid, we part ways, and we never speak again. Unless you give me a reason to continue the conversation. Clear?”

“Fine by me.” Riley shifts her weight slightly forward, a trick she learned from Cage to show that she’s about to take charge of this conversation. “So, what are these goods?” 

“There is a briefcase being smuggled into the Russian tech giant Silver Wall Technologies, Moscow office, for an off-the-books sale. I want you to acquire the briefcase before it changes hands.”

“What’s in the briefcase?” Riley asks.

“You don’t need that information to complete the job. The sale goes down tomorrow at 4:00 in a secure sub-basement lab in the R&D wing.”

“4:00 pm, tomorrow, in Moscow?” Riley asks. 

“Is the timing gonna be a problem?” The man frowns, eyes narrowing. 

“Depends on the job specs,” Mac says. Riley’s ‘cast’ him as their tech man, the one who would be most likely to ask that kind of question. She’s glad he feels confident enough right now to fall into that role. Maybe he finds it easier to be confident in someone else’s shoes. Riley knows how that feels.

“I just gave 'em to you,” The man says.

“You seem to be missing a few key details,” Riley says. 

“Your group's good. Fill in the gaps.”

“There’s one I need filled in before we can discuss a price,” Riley says. “I need to know what I’m stealing. Or I’m going to assume you’re trying to stiff me by withholding information about the value of this target.”

“I’m prepared to offer you one-point-five million for it.”

Jack frowns. “We need to know what we’re hittin’. How valuable it is to the people we’re liftin’ it from. How much they’re gonna want it back.” His hands stray to the holster at his side in a movement Riley knows is intentionally made to look unintentional. 

“Fine.”  _ Whatever it is they want it badly, to break under our push. _ Riley has to admit she didn’t expect to get this information.  _ But my team was good at moving in on the pressure points. _ It’s why she’ll never work alone. She needs her people. “It’s a dirty bomb.”

“You want us to steal a nuke?” Bozer asks. 

Riley knows he’s faking the level of surprise. They knew the Fence was going to want something big. Something really big. She didn’t exactly expect dirty bomb, but she also didn’t  _ not _ expect it. Still, “Freya” would be startled, so Riley puts on a face as shocked as Bozer’s. “We steal diamonds, gold jewelry, bearer bonds. We've never stolen something like this.”

Their contact raises an eyebrow, chuckling slightly. “‘Never have’ is different than ‘never will’. What category are you in?” 

Riley purses her lips, looking like she’s considering her options. “High-risk item, ultra-secure building in a foreign country on a nearly impossible timeline...I want two million. Not a penny less.”

“Done.”  _ They are very desperate for it. The Fence must have a buyer, and a big one at that. Someone he’s willing to do a lot to hold onto the deal for. _ Riley thinks the man seems nervous, and she knows it’s not her doing.  _ Maybe we can do a little digging, find out who might be in the market for a dirty bomb. Find out who we’re really dealing with. Because they have to be scary. _

“Congrats. You just bought yourself a weapon of mass destruction.” Riley shakes his hand.  _ I guess we’re stealing a dirty bomb. _

* * *

THE PHOENIX FOUNDATION

“Bozer, you got everything you’ll need to fake that briefcase once we have it in hand?” Riley asks. 

Bozer looks up from where he’s laid out five different kinds of suitcases that Mac assured him could legitimately be expected to transport a small dirty bomb. “I think so. I mean, we didn’t exactly get the specs.” Bozer frowns.

“I know. I’m sorry, guys, but I didn’t want to push for more…”

“It’s gonna be fine,” Mac says. “We’re good at working on the fly.”

“Yeah, I didn’t mean that to sound like you did a bad job,” Bozer says. “You rocked that. Even I would have been convinced. See, I’m telling you, you have a future in acting for sure.”

Riley just chuckles and shakes her head. “If we survive this op. Breaking into Silver Wall is not going to be easy,” Riley says. “I can’t remotely hack their security systems, they’re air gapped and highly secured with a rotating system that changes the logins every thirty seconds. I can get on their website, but not anything they don’t want me looking at.” She taps a few more keys. “Looks like they're throwing a gala in their building to celebrate some new product launch. And guess what time it starts.”

“4:00 p.m. tomorrow,” Mac says. 

“You know, a gala sounds like great cover for a sale. Buyer and seller could use an invite to this shindig as their legitimate way into a well-guarded building,” Jack says. 

“Get me an up-to-the-minute guest list for that gala,” Sarah says, barely looking up from the papers spread out in front of her on a desk.

“Uh, look at this,” Riley says. “Silver Wall created a defense division last year. It might be possible that one of their employees is the seller.”

“That would explain why they have a dirty bomb and why the sale is going down in one of their ultra-secure labs,” Mac says. 

“Is Silver Wall one of the companies we have on our watchlists?” Bozer asks. “I mean, if they’re dealing in nuclear devices…”

“Well, technically, a dirty bomb isn't a nuclear weapon,” Mac says. “It's radiological material strapped to a conventional explosive. So, bomb goes off, if it spreads radioactive dust. Depending on the element deployed, it can affect thousands.”

“A dirty bomb is hard to track and easy to hide,” Sarah says. “We cannot let this slip through our fingers, for more reasons than just the deal with the Fence. No one is planning to buy a dirty bomb off the books for any good reasons.”

“We have schematics at least,” Mac says, spreading out a rolled-up document on one of the light tables that the techs use for drafting robotics designs. “But they’re from before the defense division was set up, which means any changes they’ve made to the area they’re probably keeping the bomb in won’t be on them.”

“So this heist is gonna be completely by the seat of our pants?” Jack asks. 

“Well, if we can't get eyes inside, I guess it's gonna have to be,” Riley says.

“What if we could get eyes that have already been inside?” Sarah asks.

“How do you plan to do that?” Jack asks. 

“One call to the Portland field office,” Sarah replies. “We’ve been cultivating a group of three CIs that are operating as, for lack of a better term...Robin Hoods.” She holds up one of the papers she was sifting through on the desk. “They won’t work  _ with _ us, exactly, but I’m friendly enough that occasionally they’re willing to throw me a bone. I knew Silver Wall sounded familiar when I heard it, and that’s because that crew was behind a break-in there six months ago. Stealing some sort of software drive that had been taken from a former employee right before he was fired. They stood to make millions and he was going to lose it all.” She gives the others a small smile. “Exactly the kind of job this team specializes in.” 

“I guess it’s too much to ask to subcontract this job?” Jack says.

“They won’t work for the government. But they also won’t want a dirty bomb getting loose. So...they’ll help.” Sarah says. “Let me do the talking. They’re cagey enough about associating with the CIA, and adding new players is just going to make things more tense.”

“Got it. We’ll stay out of the way,” Jack says. 

Sarah punches in a number on the overhead screen for live video calls. Bozer’s only ever seen the lab screens used for consults with scientists at other labs around the world, or if Matty’s running a briefing remotely. But when the call is answered, he’s looking into a darkened room with three figures clustered on a set of chairs. He can’t really see faces, the room is too shadowy.”

“An in-person call? Should I feel flattered, or concerned?” A woman’s voice asks. 

“I’d like your help. Just a consultation,” Sarah says. 

“I told you, we gotta know what you’re asking for before we agree to anything.” This time it’s a man speaking. “You know the rules, we don’t exactly trust government suits.”

Jack’s frowning, has been since the man started talking. Suddenly, he steps away from the group.  _ What is he thinking? They’re already worried and Sarah said to stay out of this. He’s gonna blow the whole thing.. _ .

Jack steps up in front of the screen, eyebrows raised. “Spencer?”

The man’s voice comes back, sounding equally startled and confused. “Dalton?”

“Wait, you two know each other?” Sarah asks. 

Jack chuckles.“Yeah, but…” 

“It’s classified,” both of them reply at the same time. 

“Damn, man, I haven’t seen you since Singapore,” Jack says. “This is what you’re doing now?”

“What can I say. I like the job, and I like my team.”

“Can’t ask for more than that,” Jack agrees. “I got my own. Hey guys, come on over. This is Eliot Spencer. Only reason I’m still on this side of the dirt right now. Saved my ass in Singapore years ago.” He chuckles. “It is good to see you again, man. This is Mac, Riley, and Bozer, and you already know Sarah.”

“Hey, a fellow geek is  _ in the building, _ ” a new voice says, and Bozer notices that Riley’s carried her rig over with her. “Guess it’s up to you to keep those fellows in line, right? If this Dalton’s anything like Eliot, I imagine that’s a full-time job.” Riley just grins and nods.

“Well, if Eliot’s willing to vouch for you, I guess you’re worth listening to after all,” The woman says. “So what can we do for you?”

“We’re retrieving a dirty bomb from Silver Wall technologies in Moscow before it can be sold on the black market,” Sarah says. Bozer notices she leaves off that this theft is as part of a job to draw out the Fence. Some things are probably still confidential. 

“I can get schematics, but they’re pre-upgrade,” Riley says. “And the firewall is...impressive. Even the NSA wasn’t this tough.”

“You hacked the NSA?” The man who mentioned geeks asks.

“Um, yeah. A long time ago. Before I got recruited.” Riley chuckles. “Probably the reason I  _ got _ recruited.” 

“Wait, you hacked the NSA and then dropped off the dark web? I...remember a hacker who did that…Artemis37?” The man asks. 

“That’s me.” Riley looks slightly stunned. Bozer figures it’s not all too often hackers meet each other face to face.

“I can’t believe it! I used to follow all your exploits. You were good. Like,  _ insanely  _ good.”

“I’m flattered. And you are?”

“Well, you might know me best as the fellow who got Iceland to pay a random foster mom’s medical bills.”

“Wait...you’re KhanArtist?” Riley’s eyes widen. “This is crazy.”

“Guys, if we could focus?” Sarah says. “We have a dirty bomb to steal.” 

“Okay. Well, since it seems some of you already know each other, let me introduce my team. I’m Parker, and my associates are Eliot Spencer and Alec Hardison, or...KhanArtist, if you prefer.” Bozer hears a small smile in her voice, and then sees it as the light in the room on the screen suddenly gets a little brighter, bringing the three figures into clearer focus. The woman, a blonde with a tight ponytail, leans forward slightly. “Show me what you’ve got.” 

Mac holds up the map. “So, this is the plan so far. As you can see, the schematic is incomplete. We only have the most basic description of the interior of the Defense wing based on a handful of marketing photos we found online. The sale is happening at a gala tomorrow.”

“Going in as bartenders or cleaning crew?” 

“Cleaning crew,” Riley says. “Forged ID badges linked to dummy employee accounts will get us through lobby security. Bozer will be waiting in the getaway vehicle while the rest of us head inside. Sarah will be posing as a guest, and attempt to stall the current buyer and seller so we have enough time to steal the bomb.”

“Once we pass through the lobby, we're gonna head down what we believe is the main corridor. According to our source, the sale's happening in a sub-basement,” Mac says. 

“Getting down into the sub-basement means bypassing multiple layers of security,” Parker says. “Your idea to go through the lobby is good, using the gala for cover. But at the end of that hallway there's a security door, the same kind of locking mechanism as a bank vault, and cleaning crew badges can’t swipe you through.”

“And as you already pointed out, Silver Wall’s systems aren’t hackable from the outside. Server room is past that door, and the vents are protected with a laser grid running on battery backup,” Hardison says. Parker frowns, like somehow that’s a personal affront. “So what's your plan?” 

Mac grins, clearly excited to show them what  _ his  _ strengths are. “I can make a powerful electromagnet to slide the metal bolts, force the door open. Once we pass through the door, we're gonna head…”

There’s a sharp buzzing sound and Bozer jumps, before realizing it was coming from the screen. Apparently Parker was making it. “Sorry. They got you,” she says, entirely too cheerfully.

“What do you mean, "they got you"?” Jack asks.

“This door you just snuck through leads to a security checkpoint, so what I mean is they got you,” Eliot says. “So, unless you plan on fighting five armed guards at once, you might want to pick a different route.” 

Jack shrugs, clearly he’s not all that deterred by the idea. 

Hardison cuts in. “But you won't be going through that door. This building is pretty fun, it's full of secret hallways and rooms.”

Parker nods. “So instead of going down this main hall, you’ll want to take the side hall which leads to a service elevator.”

“Wait, wait. The service elevator doesn't go down to the sub-basement,” Bozer says. That at least they’re pretty sure wouldn’t be changed in the new plans.

“No, it doesn't,” Parker replies. “But it does go down to the service level, where, at the end of this hall, you're gonna find another door marked "maintenance closet". Inside there's another security door with a card reader that leads to a restricted hallway that only the top brass has access to. It’s separate from the main security system, which also makes it more vulnerable. The only problem is that this door lock can only be hacked from the outside panel. So unless your hacker stays in place keeping it open, you can get in, but you can’t get out.”

“Okay, so it’s down to the two of us,” Jack says. 

“One of you,” Eliot says. “There’s still patrol guards on rotation in the area, and unless you want your hacker getting hauled off while they’re waiting around for you to finish the job, someone has to keep an eye on their movements.” 

“Okay. Well, Mac, I guess that leaves you,” Jack says. 

Parker continues. “At the end of that hall there's a staircase which leads you to the sub-basement. If the meeting's happening in an R&D lab, it's gonna be a little more tricky.”

“Why would that be a little more tricky?” Mac asks. 

“There's a pressure plate security system protecting the hall that leads to the R&D labs. The slightest shift in weight sets it off, sending Silver Wall security running. The only way to disable it is with a retinal scan.”

“Well, getting past the pressure plate can't be impossible. You did it,” Riley says.

“So what'd you do steal someone's eyeball?” Jack asks. Bozer cringes. 

“Not quite.” Parker chuckles. “Used suction grips to cross it on the walls.” 

“Not sure I still trust my parkour skills that much, but it does give me an idea,” Mac says. “Using parts from the cleaning cart, I can build a sled that will suspend me over the pressure plate by transferring the weight of my body into the force keeping the wheels and cart tight against the wall.”

“Who are you again exactly?” Eliot asks. 

“Uh...My name’s MacGyver.”

“As in L.A. vigilante Phoenix?” Hardison asks. Mac nods. “Damn. For a while, we were thinking about trying to recruit you. Guess you are exactly as good at improvising as all the stories we heard claimed.”

Mac smiles, and Bozer does too. It’s not every day people associate his name and his vigilante past with reason to  _ want _ to get to know him better. More often, it’s a reason people suddenly give him the cold shoulder.

“Alright, guys, sounds like you’re ready to go steal a briefcase.” Parker smiles.

* * *

MOSCOW

ONE OF THESE DAYS RILEY’S GOING TO GET BANNED FROM THIS CITY

“Okay, Boze, you’re gonna be our eyes and ears out here,” Riley says. “I’m trusting you with all this, so don’t break it. You hear me?” 

Bozer swallows. “I don’t want to know what will happen to me if I do, do I?” He glances at the stack of tech on the shelf of their van. “What is that thing?”

“It's an IMSI catcher. It poses as a cell tower and forces all phones in the area to connect. It allows us to tap into all the local cell traffic. Hopefully, we can use this to sift through all the texts and ID the buyer and the seller by using a keyword program. Then, once we have their numbers, we can tell Sarah who she’s looking for.”

“Can I break it by looking at it?”

“No. Bozer, you’ll be fine. I have everything set up to run automatically on my backup rig, so all you have to do is keep an eye on that keyword search and when it gets matches, send the results to Sarah so she can ID the buyer and seller.” 

Jack knocks on the van door, holding a mop. “Ready? We have just under an hour until the sale.”

Mac is behind him, both of them in the plain grey coveralls that the cleaning crew wears. Riley’s wearing her own as well. She grabs the mop bucket out of the back of the van, the one Mac fitted with a false shielded bottom that will let her get her rig through security. “Should take about 30 minutes from the front entrance to the lab, so plenty of time to get in position.”

“Sarah’s already on her way in,” Bozer says. “Or more accurately, I should say, Natalie Carron is.” Thanks to some quick work on Riley’s part, and a peek at the VIP list, a French technology baroness’s flight was changed from Moscow to Morocco, and Sarah has an invitation straight through the front gates. 

“Let's get ready.” Jack holds his mop up like a weapon. Riley nods and jumps down out of the van, giving Bozer a thumbs-up.  _ He’s got this. _

* * *

Mac watches the secret door close behind him with a shiver of concern. So far, this operation has gone exactly like the consultant crew said it would. The service floor closet gave them access to the keypad door Riley just hacked, and she’s waiting to let him out, with Jack watching the hallway in case of guards, since they can’t give her eyes in the security system. And Sarah just confirmed she has both buyer and seller in custody...more or less. She convinced each of them, since they’d only communicated via text with false names, that she was the other party, walked them to a concealed space, and knocked them out. They’re currently tied up in a closet waiting for a Phoenix tac team to scoop them up. 

The bad thing is, it’s been easy so far, and Mac doesn’t trust easy jobs. They always go wrong. 

Which is exactly what happens just as he pushes the cart up to the section of gridded floor that Parker had said was pressure sensitive. Red lights begin flashing, and he jumps.

“That wasn’t me!” He gasps, before Jack or Riley can ask. 

“Then what the hell was it?” Sarah asks. She sounds slightly out of breath. 

“Someone’s already here. They got through security before me,” Mac says. “So much for the sled idea.” 

He doesn’t need to worry about altering the guards anymore, so he abandons the cart and runs across the pressure plates. The door to a space marked in Russian as “Lab 3” is open, and inside a figure is bent over a small silver briefcase.The woman turns around, her red hair swaying around her face, eyes wide.

“Charlotte Coal?”

Mac recognizes her from the briefing. _ I thought she wasn’t working with the Fence, because his people accepted Riley as her stand in. So why would she be here? _ But that’s not his most immediate problem. That’s the persistent beeping coming from the case in front of her.

“Coal’s here?” Sarah asks.

“Yeah, but we have a bigger problem.” Mac glances at the bomb. “The case had a trigger attached to it. And when she picked it up she set it off. We have nine and a half minutes until this thing blows. Jack, Riley, Sarah, get out. You need to make it to minimum safe distance, just in case.”

“We’re not leavin’ you, hoss,” Jack says. “Riley, get me in there now.”

“No! Get out!” Mac shouts, then shakes his head. He can’t argue, there’s no time. He turns back to Coal. “I’m going to try to save our lives but I need you to trust me right now. I’m one of the good guys.”

Coal just nods and steps aside slightly, letting Mac get a look at what they’re dealing with. 

“Okay, we've got a brick of plastic explosive strapped to a detonator. Nothing too fancy,” Mac says.

Coal nods, Mac figures in her line of work with the CIA she’s seen plenty of devices like it. “What worries me is that the radiological compound is Americium-241. If this goes off, it could kill thousands, minimum safe distance or not.”

“Let's make sure that doesn't happen.” Mac looks up, looking the woman in the eyes. “It’s going to take both of us to disarm it. We have to trust each other. I don’t want to go boom, and I don’t think you do either.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

Mac points into the box. “It looks like you set off the detonator when you lifted the box. There’s a mercury switch inside. The good news is, I can see the wires in there. The bad news is, I can’t reach them right now, and I need both hands free. I need you to lift the explosive, 'cause the wiring is tucked underneath, and I can't reach it.”

“Right. Got it.” Coal reaches inside, picks up the small black box, and holds it out of the way while Mac digs out the wires, pulls out the one that is connected to the explosive, and snips it carefully with his knife.

The beeping stops, although the alarms are still blaring in the background, and Mac lets out a faint sigh of relief. 

“Bomb's disarmed. You can put it down.”

“Who are you?” Coal asks. “And what are you doing here?”

“We’re...um...with the CIA,” Mac says, figuring it’s easier than explaining that Phoenix was subcontracted. “Sarah Adler-” Mac frowns, he should be able to remember her married name but it’s not coming to mind, “Um...she’s your op leader? She’s here. Looking for you.”

“Oh god. Tell her I’m sorry. For everything.” 

“What?” Mac asks. 

“They have my family. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. But I have to do this.” 

In the moment it takes him to wonder what she meant by that, a pair of handcuffs are slapped onto his wrist, attached to the leg of the table, and she’s grabbed the case and run. 

Mac pulls frantically against the cuffs.  _ No, no, no. _ He tries to calm down and breathe and think. He has to pick the lock. He has to get out of here, but he’s panicking. And that’s making it hard to think of what options he has. 

The door bursts open and he hears booted feet rushing in. Hands grab him and shove him against the table, and Mac cringes. Everyone is yelling but it’s in Russian and he doesn’t understand enough to follow. All he knows is, he’s in trouble. He’s in a lot of trouble. 

* * *

SILVER WALL

JACK GOT LET IN THE LEGAL WAY

Jack hurries down the halls to the secure holding area. He’s got the orders from Matty that are going to get Mac out of this place, and not a moment too soon. It looks too much like a prison for  _ Jack’s _ comfort, so he can’t imagine what it’s been doing to Mac. 

A guard directs him, based on the information he gives, to a small room with a locked grey door and a window that has the sort of glass with wire embedded in it. He pulls a key out of his pocket, opens the door, and shouts inside. “You’re free to go.”

Jack pushes past him to look inside and freezes. Mac looks...catatonic. “Hey, let me talk to him, okay?” Jack asks. The guard nods and steps back, leaving them alone in the room. Jack walks over to Mac slowly, leaning down beside him. 

“Mac?” Jack asks. The kid looks miserable, seated on the edge of the chair. “What did they do to you, kiddo?” There are bruises showing on his cheek and blood trickling from his lip.

“They wanted to know who I was working with. And where the Americium was,” Mac says dully. “They...um...searched me.” 

Jack bites his lip, feeling a hot anger starting to burn in his stomach.  _ I know exactly what he means when he says that. _ And there’s a lightning bolt of pure terror running through his spine at the thought of what might have been done to Mac besides. “Did they…?” That empty blankness in Mac’s face is too familiar. Too terrifying.  _ Please, God, no.  _

Mac shakes his head weakly. “One wanted to,” he finally whispers. “Said no one would care. Said maybe I’d start talking then.” His hands are clenched tightly in his lap, but one moves up to tug the zipper on his coverall to his throat, even though it’s already as high as it will go. 

Jack takes a shaky breath, willing himself not to scream or sob or curse. 

Mac wipes one hand over his eyes. “A-another guard stopped him. Said some people were asking about me. That...that he couldn’t...couldn’t hurt me. Not when someone would find out.” 

_ Thank God Matty made the call so fast. That she risked so much to get him out of there. _ Jack knows she burned up a lot of notes to call in to get an unsanctioned operative out of this mess. 

“He gave me back my clothes and took me here to wait for you,” Mac says, shivering. 

“Oh kiddo. Oh kiddo I’m so sorry.” Jack whispers. He wraps Mac in a hug, feeling him shake. “Let’s get you out of here.” Mac nods, standing up weakly. Jack opens the door and both of them step out into the hall. 

They walk as quickly as Mac is able to go to the door. There are two guards beside it, and Jack shows them the document on his phone that Matty sent authorizing him to pick Mac up, and clearing him of charges. The guards frown, but the one on the right waves them through. 

Mac flinches away from the man on the left. Jack feels a wave of anger flooding him.  _ That must be the one who threatened him.  _ He wants to punch the man, but all that will do is land  _ him  _ in a cell. Still, it might be worth the satisfaction. 

The man’s eyes are clearly roving Mac’s body, and Jack practically snarls as he steps in between the man and his kid.  _ You sick bastard. _ Mac’s cheeks are flaming with humiliation.

The guard whispers something, and while it’s in Russian, Jack knows exactly what the man is saying. His stomach turns.  _ And this guy had his hands on Mac when he was vulnerable and defenseless. _ Even if Mac is telling the truth and nothing happened, and Jack trusts him to be honest (for the most part), Jack is furious at the thought that this man will have any memories of his kid. He’d heard what Murdoc said, what feels like an eternity ago now, back when Mac was supposed to pretend to  _ be _ that monster, about the men who still imagined Mac because they’d had him in the past. And it makes his blood boil to think of what this man might do when he goes home tonight. Even though Mac is out of his hands, they can’t erase him from this man’s mind. 

“Don’t, he’s not worth it,” Mac whispers, and Jack realizes his right hand has curled into a tight fist. “I want to get out of here. Please.” Jack nods. Mac wants  _ him,  _ and getting himself thrown in a cell will not do anything to help the kid. He just wraps his arm a little tighter around Mac’s shoulders. 

Mac stumbles beside him to the van, huddling in a seat on the drive to the airfield. Jack explains to the rest of the team in an abridged, whispered version, and Bozer looks angry, Riley looks sick, and Sarah looks guilty. Jack just feels numb. He knows eventually the anger will surface, but right now, he can’t seem to summon any more energy than Mac can. It’s too much. It’s not fair. It shouldn’t have happened. He feels like he’s having one of those dreams where his legs are too heavy and he can’t move. He thinks he might wake up. But he knows he won’t. It’s all he can do to coordinate himself enough to move Mac into the Phoenix jet when they arrive. 

Sarah’s flying instead of Jack, this time. She’s just as qualified, and Jack can tell she wanted to leave Mac with his family. She felt like she was intruding; she didn’t have to say it but Jack could see it in her eyes. He’s going to go up later and relieve her and talk to her, but for now, he respects that she left Mac in the hands of people who know him best. Mac’s probably grateful too, that he won’t have to break down in front of someone he barely knows. His dignity’s been shredded enough today. 

“Mac, if you need to sit the rest of this out, no one will blame you.” Riley sits down next to him on the couch, careful not to touch him. “This op is already up in the air with Coal acting on her own. I promise, it won’t be a problem if you need to step back.”

“I need to do something,” Mac whispers weakly. “I don’t want to sit and think.” His hands are shaking, and Jack knows it has nothing to do with his head injury, and everything to do with fear. “I don’t want to do that until I’m home.” 

Jack already knows how tonight will go. How Mac won’t want to take his clothes off to shower, even though he’s going to want to shower so he feels less dirty. That he’ll stay awake as long as he can until exhaustion pushes his head under into nightmares. That they’ll probably spend most of the night cooking a big batch of Momma’s biscuits for the dinner Mac will absolutely refuse to postpone, and that Mac will inevitably be sleepy and distracted enough to need to be watched carefully so he doesn’t mix the salt and sugar up. 

“Here.” Bozer holds out a mug of hot chocolate. Mac takes it gratefully, wrapping still-trembling fingers around the mug. Jack bites his lip. Mac hasn’t stopped shivering since Jack saw him in that cell. He’s still wearing the cleaning crew jumpsuit, although he’s got one of Jack's extra sweatshirts on over it, and a blanket spread over his legs. No one’s mentioned it or bothered to ask if he wants to change. They already know he won’t. 

As sad as it is that the team is familiar enough with Mac’s panic inducing stressors to know what to do and not do, Jack finds it reassuring. At least Mac is surrounded by people who care and understand him, who know how to help. It almost makes up for the fact that they’re also the reason he’s in these terrible situations in the first place. It’s days like this that Jack thinks of how much happier and healthier his kid might be with a different job. Something that doesn’t involve getting caught breaking into high-security buildings and being strip-searched for something he doesn’t even have. 

They have a long flight home, and Jack is sure at some point Mac will fall asleep only to wake up panicking. So he sits down beside Mac, within touching range but avoiding contact. Mac will seek him out if he’s okay with touch. Jack’s content to sit and wait for whatever it is Mac needs from him right now. Even if it’s just his silence. 

* * *

LANDING STRIP

LOS ANGELES

“Thanks to the delay getting Mac back from Silver Wall, Charlotte was able to make a clean getaway,” Riley says, trying to keep the emotion out of her voice. “Matty, Friar picked her up landing on a private strip a few miles away from the city, but we lost her after that. And she ditched any tech, so we can’t track a phone.” 

They’re also down a team member. Sarah got a call mid-flight that her boss needs to see her ASAP, and she headed to the L.A. field office the moment they landed. Apparently the incident at Silver Wall is something the CIA isn’t too enthusiastic about. Riley doesn’t envy the woman that meeting, but she also knows Sarah can’t just refuse to go.  _ That would make things even worse.  _

“So Charlotte is gone, we have confirmation that she’s been blackmailed to steal the device but clearly it wasn’t by the Fence, and now there's a dirty bomb loose somewhere on American soil. This is the nightmare scenario we were all so desperately trying to avoid.” Matty doesn’t sound angry, though. She sounds exhausted.  _ We all thought it was best to gloss over the details of Mac’s situation until the op was over, but she has to know something bad happened. Matty knows us too well. _

Mac himself is standing off to the side, arms wrapped around himself and shivering in the misty rain that’s started falling, even though he’s wearing Jack’s sweatshirt, a pair of jeans, and a flannel button-down over his coveralls. But he looks up at what Riley’s just said. “Wait a second.”

Riley smiles despite the situation, because there’s a soft glimmer in Mac’s eyes that’s been horrifyingly absent since Jack got him back from Silver Wall. “Matty, Mac's got that look.”

“That "I've got an idea that may or may not work" look?” 

“Oh, yeah. That's the one.”

Mac is pacing, his shivering slowing as his hands begin to flutter. Riley recognizes one of the newer signs that Mac is thinking, and grins when Jack digs into his pockets and scrounges out one more paperclip.  _ Guess there was one more hiding that he didn’t find on the plane. _ Mac forms the wire into a radiation symbol and holds it up, a small smile on his own face. “We may not be able to trace Charlotte's burner phone, but we might be able to track the dirty bomb itself.”

“You can do that?” Bozer asks. 

“Yeah. Or, at least, I think so. The shielding on the briefcase was terrible. It was leaking radiation.”

“You’re just telling me that now?” Jack asks. “Maybe I should be glad we didn’t get it.”

“Not enough to kill you or anything, but it should be enough to put us on the trail,” Mac says. “I need your cell phones.”

“All of them?” Jack asks. 

“The more I have the better,” Mac says.

“Okay, fine. But I'd like to get this back. Phones ain't cheap, Mac.”

“You didn't get the insurance?” Bozer asks.

“It’s the principle of the thing, Boze.” Jack says. “The principle of it.” But he hands over his phone anyway, as do Bozer and Riley. 

“What are you doing, Mac?” Bozer asks. 

“Okay, so, fun fact about cell phone cameras: they can see way more of the electromagnetic spectrum than we can, including gamma rays, which is what the dirty bomb is giving off.”

“Hold up, what are you saying there's an app that lets you track dirty bombs?” Jack asks. 

Mac’s smile gets a little wider. “Actually, kind of. The DoD developed a software for radiation detection devices that are basically handheld computers attached to cameras, which are exactly what cell phones are. So all we have to do is download that software and I should be able to make a portable radiation detector.”

Riley nods. “That's a great idea, Mac, but getting authorization from the DoD to use their software could take hours. Hours that we just don't have.” She holds out her hand. “Can I have my phone back? Just for a second?”

Mac hands it over, and Riley dials Matty again. “Hey Matty, we sort of need to get something from the DoD...like, now.”

“Do it.”

“Music to my ears, Matty. One boss-approved hack of the DoD coming up.” She hands Mac back the phone and sits down with her rig. “This could take a little while, guys, so we might as well get comfortable.” The rain is starting to soak into her hair, so she climbs into the back seat of the SUV Matty had waiting at the airstrip and keeps typing. Bozer joins her in the back, and Jack gets in the driver’s seat, Mac sitting shotgun. Jack turns the engine over and turns on the heat, and Riley watches Mac hold his hands to the vent gratefully. 

Finally, she’s past the firewalls and has the file she wants. “I'm downloading the software now, Mac. I’ll send it to the phones.”

Mac nods, picks up the array of phones he’s created, and follows her instructions to download the program. Thankfully, Phoenix issue phones have high storage capacity. 

“Is it working?” Riley asks.

“Um…” Mac frowns, holding the phones up and moving them around. “Yeah. We’ve got something.”

“I see it,” Riley says. “Let’s go.” A notification from Matty pings up on her computer, and she takes a moment to read it. “Okay, Mac, NEST is on alert and choppers are in the air sweeping for anomalies in the radiation background map.”

“They made a radiation background map of L. A.?” Bozer asks. 

Jack nods. “Yeah. Every major city in the U.S. has been mapped by helicopter to measure background radiation levels.So if a nuclear device enters a city, it has a chance of being found, because it appears as an anomaly against the recorded background.”

“And the map acts as a baseline for my little device here, so we can pick up on low levels of leaking gamma rays coming from Charlotte's briefcase,” Mac says. “That way we can track her.”

Riley consults her rig. “Looks like gamma ray levels are increasing. Take a left up here, Boze.” Her rig pings again. “Mac, NEST is confirming a gamma ray anomaly just ahead of our current location.We found it.”

Jack pulls over, parking the car in the back lot of what looks like a warehouse complex. “She's got to be close.”

Riley’s rig chimes and she glances down. “Gamma readings just dipped. Not sure why.”

“Maybe a combination of shielding and distance is dampening the signal,” Mac suggests, but a muscle in his jaw is fluttering. The four of them climb out and walk along the side of a low building until they reach a chain-link fence. Riley sees Jack, who’s in front, suddenly duck behind a stack of crates and tires.

“I got movement. Black SUV, ten o’clock,” Jack says. “Yep, that’s her. Mac, can I have my phone back now?” Mac nods and hands it over, and Riley watches Jack dial Matty. “We got eyes on Charlotte but not the bomb.”

Suddenly, a second car pulls into the lot. It’s a grey sedan, and the driver is the man Riley remembers from the meet she went to. He steps out and opens the passenger door for a balding man with glasses and a very expensive-looking silver suit. 

“All right, Matty, we also got visual on a guy I think is The Fence,” Jack says. “But this is about to go very south.” Riley nods. She’s the one the Fence’s right hand man will be expecting, and based on the way the man seems to be whispering to his boss right now, Charlotte is in deep trouble. 

A third vehicle enters the lot, a white car with a loud engine, and Riley suppresses a groan.  _ How much crazier is today going to get?  _ “Hey, Matty, we just got  _ another  _ group show up to the party,” Jack says. The car door opens, and Jack practically snarls at the sight of the driver stepping out. 

“Who’s he?” Bozer asks.

“That's Darren Farragut,” Jack growls. “He's a domestic terrorist, currently number eight on the FBI's Most Wanted list. Last year he published a manifesto detailing how he plans to overthrow the U. S. government.”

Mac sighs. “The Fence wasn't just buying that bomb from Charlotte. He's flipping it straight to the end user.”

“If Farragut gets his hands on that bomb, there is no telling where in the U.S. he'll use it. We need a plan. Fast,” Jack says.

Riley has one. She’s had it since the Fence showed up. They were too preoccupied on the plan for Bozer to even think of creating a fake case like they’d planned, but the Phoenix-issued cars keep their repair kits in heavy cases that, ever since Mac used one to partly contain a blast in Cincinnati, are designed to be used as explosives containers as well, thanks to Jill.  _ It’s always nice to know R&D pays attention to what we use in the field. Even when it’s weird.  _

“Be right back. I got an idea,” she says, running back to the car.

“Riley…” Jack calls after her, but she’s already gone. 

She digs the kit in its case out of the back, grabs the keys from the visor and starts the SUV, driving up the road to the entrance of the lot where all three other vehicles are parked. She turns off the motor and steps out.

“Who the hell are you?” Farragut asks, and Riley takes a deep breath, grabs the repair kit off the passenger seat, and steps out. 

“I’m Freya. The Fence hired me to bring him this. Who the hell are  _ you _ ?” 

Coal’s eyes are wide with something that looks like panic. “She's lying. I'm Freya, you know I am. I've got the briefcase you hired me to steal. And I have no idea who that woman is.” Charlotte reaches into her own car and pulls out the silver case that must be the one she lifted from Silver Wall.

“I have no idea who  _ you  _ are,” The Fence says sharply. “This woman is the one I met with.” he nods to riley

Riley holds up the case. She’s going to have to hope her bluff is good because this whole thing is spinning out of control. “I don't know what game you're playing, but my people broke into Silver Wall and stole the dirty bomb. I've got it right here. Whoever this woman is, she's not Freya.”

Coal shakes her head. “Whoever this woman is, she has no idea what she's talking about, and I think she'd be wise to walk away right now. I'm Freya. I have the dirty bomb. And I don't want anyone to get hurt.” Something definitely isn’t right, and Riley has the sinking feeling she knows why.  _ The Fence didn’t kidnap Charlotte’s family. But the real buyer did. _

“Why don’t I just take both of these then?” Farragut says, stepping forward. “You,” He nods to Riley, “get to walk away alive, and you…” He points to Charlotte, then to his car, where Riley can see three shadows in the back seat, “get what you were promised.” 

Charlotte nods, and Farragut walks to the car, opens the door, and pulls out a gun, motioning for the people inside to step out. Riley watches as a tall, dark-haired man emerges, holding a young boy and girl close beside him, his hands tense on their shoulders.  _ Now what? He knows who the real Freya is, the Fence  _ thinks _ he does, and they’re not going to agree. And now he just proved he went behind the Fence’s back to make his own deal.  _

“What is this?” The Fence asks. “I demand an explanation!” His associate’s hand is on his sidearm. 

And then something explodes.

* * *

Jack rubs his hands over his face in frustration. _ I can only live with one self-sacrificing idiot in the family, and damn it, that idiot is supposed to be me. _ Not Mac, not Riley. But Riley’s already gone, and now they just have to make sure she survives this. He reaches for his phone again, hoping he’s calm enough to speak rationally to Matty. “Matty, we have visual confirmation that Charlotte has the dirty bomb. And to buy us some time, Riley just walked off to bluff The Fence and Darren Farragut. With our emergency roadside repair kit.”

Matty sighs. “Guys, we cannot lose that briefcase. If The Fence or Farragut disappear with it, there's no telling what city it could blow up in.”

“And we also need to make sure it doesn't blow up right here,” Bozer says. 

“Agreed. So we need to hold off on the tac teams. Adding more guns to this situation could end very badly,” Mac says. He’s elbow deep in a trash can at the moment. A few seconds later, he holds up a plastic bottle with a look of triumph. 

“Does this mean you have a plan?” Jack asks. 

“I have half of one,” Mac says, starting to arrange things on the wet ground. “I'm gonna recover the bomb in that suitcase using a much, much smaller one, except the only thing dirty about mine is the trash it's made from: aluminum foil, corroded battery acid, a plastic bottle, and an old tire.”

“Whatever you’re doing, do it fast,” Bozer says. “Because I think we just found out who took Charlotte’s family.” 

Jack looks up and groans. A man and two kids are standing beside Farragut’s car.  _ Damn it, this whole thing is out of control. _

“I’m ready!” Mac says. “When this blows, things are gonna happen fast. Jack, get Coal’s family. Bozer, get Riley. I’ll get Charlotte and the real bomb.” 

Jack nods. Mac rolls the tire through a gap in the fence, and a moment later, there’s a loud explosion. 

Jack is already in motion, racing across the parking lot. He drops Farragut with a shoulder shot and grabs for the stunned family. “I'm friends with Charlotte, come on! Go, go, hurry! Come on, let's go! Go, go, go, go! Let's get out of here now.”

He wants to look back, wants to see how Mac and Bozer and Riley and Charlotte are faring, because he can hear more gunshots. But he knows that all of them would want the kids safe first. That’s everyone’s priority, and it has to be Jack’s too.  _ But I want  _ my _ kids safe too. _

There’s a welcome blare of sirens, and Jack turns around from pushing Coal’s husband through the gap in the fence to see police cars screeching up, and officers jumping out and raising guns. The Fence and his associate finally lower theirs. 

Jack races back across the lot, for where he can see Mac and Charlotte behind Charlotte’s car. Out of the corner of his eye he sees Riley and Bozer running toward them too. But Mac holds up a hand to stop them, pointing to the case. 

“Guys, get back.” His voice is hoarse. “The case is leaking.”

“Mac, is there anything you can do to contain that?” Riley asks, but Jack is standing frozen. He knows enough about the Americium to know that Mac’s already been exposed to too much.  _ No, no, no, no. _

Mac is still talking. “Yeah, I can, uh, I can use cement or or the lead lining…”

Charlotte shakes her head, a hand pressed to her side which Jack can now see is bleeding onto the rain-dampened pavement. “No, it's okay.”

“What do you mean it's okay?” Bozer asks. 

“The dirty bomb isn't here. I stashed it on my way in.” Charlotte takes a deep breath and winces. “I wasn’t going to let thousands of people die somewhere.” She opens the case with a click, and Jack sees a gun inside. “I was supposed to meet Farragut and exchange it for my family. I was going to at least give them enough of a distraction to get away.” She glances at Mac. “I’m sorry, for what happened at Silver Wall. But he would have killed them if I didn’t at least pretend to deliver, and I couldn’t risk the Fence brokering a deal with him.”

“About that,” Riley says, helping Charlotte to her feet and pressing her own jacket against the bullet wound. “I’m still really confused. What happened?”

“Farragut found out who the Fence was hiring and decided to cut out the middle man entirely.”

“And apparently he also didn’t want to drop any money on the deal, so he decided to blackmail you instead,” Jack says. “How did he find your family?”

“I made a mistake,” Charlotte says, head lowered. “I made contact, and he traced my call. The next day, he sent me a video, proof that he had them. And he said he’d kill them all if I didn’t make a new deal. With him.” 

Riley nods. “But he probably didn’t want to tell the Fence he was out of the deal until he had the merchandise in hand. So when the Fence called him saying  _ he _ had the Americium, he couldn’t take the chance that we had the real thing and he didn’t. So he came to the meet.” 

Charlotte nods. “I knew things weren’t right when he told me to go to the original location. But there was nothing I could do.”

Jack looks up at the sound of tires screeching across pavement. A small black car squeals to a stop, and Sarah jumps out of the driver’s seat. 

“I am so sorry. About all of this,” Charlotte says, as Sarah rushes up. “But…” She looks back to where her family is being escorted back from their hiding place by the police officers, and smiles through the grimace of pain when her son breaks free of his father’s hold, runs up, and hugs her, “I couldn’t let them get hurt.”

“We got the Ladybird message,” Sarah says. 

“I was afraid to risk sending anything clearer. I knew Farragut had hacked my phone, and I didn’t want him to know I was reaching out for help,” Charlotte says. “I was hoping you would realize it was a clue.” 

“You will still have a  _ lot _ of explaining to do,” Sarah says. “But...for what it’s worth, I’m glad to hear the truth.” She puts an arm around Charlotte’s shoulder. “Now, let’s get you home.”

* * *

MAC’S HOUSE

FOR ONCE, NOTHING IN THE KITCHEN IS ON FIRE.

Matty looks around the table at her agents. It’s been a tough mission for everyone, she can’t quite erase the feelings of helpless fury she felt reading Jack’s report of the events at Silver Wall. All around, there are grey areas and struggle. She doesn’t exactly blame Charlotte Coal for leaving Mac to be caught while she left to save her family, but she also doesn’t want to see the woman right away. She can’t be responsible for what she might do.

She tears herself out of the thoughts and focuses on the conversation around the table. 

“Well, don’t tell your mom, but I think Mac’s biscuits just may have surpassed hers,” Riley says to Jack, around a mouthful of flaky bread.

“Oh, you can tell her all you want, she’ll just be proud of her grandson’s baking skills,” Jack says with a grin. “She always says a Dalton should be good at three things, riding a horse, roping a cow, and making biscuits fluffy enough to melt in your mouth.” He grins. “We’ve got one of three covered now I guess. And we’ll definitely keep working on the other two.” 

Mac ducks his head, and Matty could swear he’s blushing.  _ He’s still not used to being praised. Especially by family. _ She knows James would never have been so forthcoming with it. 

She pushes the man out of her head. He doesn’t belong at this table, not even in her thoughts. This is a time for the family Mac chose. 

Sarah looks up from her own plate. “This is fantastic, guys. Thanks for inviting me.”

“Well, since you’re on suspension for a month, it seemed like the least we could do to make up for it,” Bozer says. 

“It’s worth it,” Sarah says. “And I think Charlotte thinks so too.” Matty heard that the woman’s facing an indefinite suspension and possible court-martial. But her family is safe, and to her, that’s probably all that matters. 

“Is there any more news on what’s going to happen to her?” Mac asks. It’s clear he’s put aside any hard feeling he had after the Silver Wall incident. Matty wishes she could do that so easily.

“Last I heard, her case will go up the ranks for a decision in Washington,” Sarah says. “But I’m going to speak on her behalf, and given the circumstances I don’t think she’ll be facing jail time. But...I think her days with the CIA are over.”

“That’s rough,” Riley says.

“I’ve already talked to some people who might be willing to make arrangements for her afterward,” Sarah says.

“These wouldn’t happen to be the consulting team we talked to, would they?” Jack asks.

“I can neither confirm nor deny,” Sarah replies with a smile. “Let’s just say she and her family will be well taken care of if I have anything to say about it.” 

Mac nods with a small smile, and Matty feels any lasting animosity melt away.  _ He’s forgiven her, he wants the best for her. I guess I have to do that too. _

“You forgot the fish!” Bozer says suddenly. 

“What fish?” Jack asks. “We didn’t make…” But Bozer’s already dashed into the house, only to return with a blue and grey mess of plastic, painted tire tread, and some other garbage Matty’s not sure she wants to be able to identify. But she can at least make out what it appears to be.  _ Oh Bozer. _

“Oh  _ no, _ ” Mac groans. 

“ _ That’s _ the mermaid tail?” Sarah asks, choking on a bite of her steak. “Oh God, Bozer, that...that actually is terrible.”

“Because it’s been sitting in the garage for eight years!” Bozer insists. “I could make a really good one now. I actually have the right supplies.”

“I don’t think Matty’s going to let you use Phoenix resources for that,” Riley says. 

Matty smirks. “Actually, Riley, I think I would. If, and only if, Bozer, you can bring me photographic proof that it worked.”

“I’m not gonna wear it,” Mac says. 

“I’m game,” Leanna chuckles. “I used to want to be a dolphin when I was a kid.” 

“It’s a deal,” Matty says, and watches as the entire table begins laughing hysterically. At the end of the day, this is what matters, and suddenly she can’t find it in her to hate Charlotte Coal’s decision at all. Because this is  _ her _ family, and Matty would do anything to protect them. She understands completely. 


	14. Wilderness+Training+Survival

###  313-Wilderness+Training+Survival

THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE

NO CELL SIGNAL OUT HERE

NOT THAT RILEY KNOWS, SHE LEFT HER PHONE AT HOME

Riley leans back in her seat, enjoying the picturesque mountain scenery flashing by. It’s rare that she can actually enjoy the views outside the car windows. They’ve traveled through a lot of picturesque countries on their ops, but Riley’s usually glued to her computer screen tracking bad guys or hacking satellites. Today, she can just look up and watch eagles soaring, mountains jutting into the pale blue sky, and deer emerging briefly from the trees to stare at the car before vanishing again into the shadowy woods. 

She can tell Jack’s enjoying the chance to take a relaxing trip as well. He’s not driving with his foot on the floor, which is the only reason Riley is able to enjoy the scenery, and not see just a passing blur of green and blue and grey. 

She hears rustling and clicking from behind her and turns around. Mac and Bozer are in the back seat, at Mac’s insistence. Riley’d asked if he wanted to ride up front with Jack, but he’d told her it was her turn. Which it is, technically, but she wasn’t going to push it. Still, she thinks they’re having fun back there, they’ve been playing kids’ car games for the first three hours of the drive, until Riley heard snoring.  _ Might as well get their sleep while they can. _

“Jack, this cooler’s empty. You forgot to pack the drinks?” Bozer asks.

“He didn’t forget,” Riley says with a grin.  _ And here we go. Camping with Jack is always an adventure the first time. _ And one of the few times Riley doesn’t actually have food stashed somewhere in her gear.  _ Not even a single piece of chocolate. _

“No senile old man joke, Riley?” Jack asks. “You’re slipping.” 

“I’m afraid of finding something in my boots,” Riley replies. “I don’t dare insult you this weekend.”

“Ah, the truth comes out. See, maybe we should do this all the time, and you’d actually show me some respect.” Jack chuckles. “Oooh, look, a bear.” He points out the window.

“Bears?” Bozer asks weakly.

“Yeah, Boze. Everywhere up here. Don’t be surprised if you wake up to one sniffing your face,” Jack replies. 

“Or tickling you with a piece of grass,” Riley says, shaking her head. “The only bear up here bold enough to seek out a group of humans is gonna be this  _ papa bear. _ ” She grins at Jack. “But trust me, you might prefer the company of the real thing after listening to Jack snore all night.”

“Oh come on, it’s not that bad,” Jack insists. 

“It kind of is,” Mac replies. “I can hear you at night in the house, from across the hall.”

“Trust me, we’ll be fine,” Riley says. “I’ve been coming up here with Jack for over five years, we’ve never been eaten.” 

“Speaking of eating. I’m glad the bears won’t be chowing down on us, don’t get me wrong, but that doesn’t answer why there’s nothing packed for us,” Bozer insists. 

Jack chuckles. “Because packed coolers are for sissies. We'll be roughing it.”

“And "roughing it" means no water?” Mac asks. “Last time we took some. And sleeping bags. And a tent.” 

“That was starting you off easy, city kid,” Jack says. 

Riley manages the ghost of a smile, because she remembers why Jack was so gentle with Mac their first trip.  _ It was one of the first things they did together after Bishop, and Murdoc too. _ Jack had wanted to get Mac away from any bad memories, and also not stress him out too much, so he’d definitely fudged some of the requirements for Phoenix’s wilderness training regimen. Patty had overlooked it, for Mac’s sake. It’s been years now, and worse things have happened since, but some part of Riley is always going to see the Bishop Prison disaster as her own fault. She understands that every agent has those ops, that she has to forgive herself and move on. But it still hurts. 

“"Roughing it" means no water, no food, no cell phone, certainly, no tent. Just the four of us in the great outdoors. Whatever we need, we will make it or we will find it.” Jack grins. “Besides, it means we can check wilderness survival refresher course off our training to-do list.” 

“So I guess we won't be enjoying s'mores by the fire later.” Bozer mumbles.

“Not unless you find a mallow plant,” Mac says. “Did you know that’s what marshmallows were originally made from? _ Athaea officinalis. _ If you squeeze the sap from the roots and whip it into a fluffy paste, it makes the original version of a marshmallow.”

“Yuck,” Bozer mutters.

“Actually, it’s probably good,” Riley says. “And Mac  _ can _ cook now...do you know what a mallow plant looks like?” 

“Um...I’m not sure,” Mac says. 

“We can have s’mores when we get home, sound good Boze?” Jack asks with a chuckle. 

“You know, I think that’s an acceptable compromise,” Bozer says. “A few days without smog and processed foods...who knows, maybe I’ll come home with my sugar cravings cured.”

“I’ll just be glad not to hear a phone ring for the next seventy-two hours,” Mac says. He looks still half-asleep, curled up as much as he can in the seat, arms crossed over his chest and hair falling down into his eyes. He looks like a kid on a road trip. 

“Yeah, I think we could all use a break from the chaos,” Riley says. “I for one will be very glad not to see a screen or hear a notification for the next three days.” Coming out here has always been something she deeply enjoyed.  _ Elwood wasn’t much for the traditional dad stuff.  _ She learned to bait a con from him. But she learned to bait a fish hook with Jack.  _ Sure, the first time we did this I was terrible.  _ But Jack had also finally earned a little more respect in her eyes. He was patient, a good teacher. And for all that he was hopelessly lost when it came to Riley’s skill set, she got the chance to see that there was more to him than just his sniper skills and hand to hand combat.  _ Watching apocalyptic thrillers always felt less scary after that, because I knew as long as I stuck with Jack, the world could end and we’d still survive. _ Granted, now she could probably do it on her own, but still. She can’t think of anywhere she’d rather be at the end of the world than with this family. 

Granted, not all the family is here. Abina is going to an orientation weekend, so she wasn’t able to tag along, and Leanna is helping Matty on some special assignment Matty doesn’t seem to want to talk much about, although she’s said enough that Riley can tell it’s about Ethan. And Cage and Eileen are on their own, more extreme version of this training. As far as they know, from Sam’s last check-in, things are going well.  _ Would have been fun to invite them along, but I think getting the OK to let Eileen leave the area she’s supposed to be would have been a hard sell.  _ They had enough of a time getting travel orders so Sam could come down when Jack got hurt at Christmas. 

Jack pulls the jeep up outside a tumbledown place that looks like the setting of a western gunslingers’ last stand. The sign over the rickety porch reads “Freddy’s Last Mile”, and a swing creaks lazily in the breeze. 

Jack turns the vehicle off and steps out, and Riley follows him. Mac and Bozer are getting out more slowly, and Riley can tell the atmosphere is getting to them.  _ Oh, this is going to be fun. _

“Uh, Jack, where are we?” Bozer asks. “'Cause this looks like the kind of place where serial killers get their start.”

“Yeah, well, it's where we're gonna drop the Jeep off. Assuming the owner's okay with it,” Jack says lightheartedly, striding confidently toward the porch. 

“What owner? Looks like no one's here,” Mac says. Then Riley hears a rooster crow and a goat bleat. “But...um, I guess if there’s animals, there has to be someone…”

The door creaks open, and a man in bib overalls and a flannel shirt steps out onto the porch, holding a battered banjo across his chest. 

Bozer flinches. “Oh, God. He's got a banjo. I've seen this movie. I know how it ends. I die first.”

“He can hear you,” Riley whispers. 

The man sits down on the swing, and starts tuning up his banjo. He plays a handful of notes before looking up at the team, his grey eyes sharp above the tangled silver beard covering the lower half of his face. 

“You folks ain't from around here.”

“That's exactly how the movie starts,” Bozer whispers. 

Jack strikes a confident pose, hands on hips. “Me and my friends here, we were gonna go backpacking in Walker Gorge.”

“You sure you want to give him all this information, Jack?” Mac asks quietly. Riley can see his mind spinning, trying to decide if Jack, the decorated secret agent who only pretends to be an idiot, has  _ actually  _ lost his mind for real. 

“Eh, it'll be fine.” Jack turns back to the man on the porch. “And we were wondering if we could just leave the Jeep here. I'd be more than willing to pay you for your troubles, if that's okay.”

The man only raises an eyebrow. “Not a good idea for you folks to go off in those woods.”

Riley decides it’s time for her to start playing into the whole thing. “Uh, maybe we should just get back on the road, find another spot.” She takes a shaky step backward, feigning nervousness. 

“Yeah, he's giving me, uh, "kill us in our sleep" kind of vibes,” Bozer says.

And then the man on the porch starts laughing. So does Jack. So does Riley. Jack jumps up on the porch, pulling the older man into a hug. 

“How you doing, Freddy?” 

“On this side of the dirt, Jack. How are you?”

“Man, it is good to see you.”

“Good to see you too.” 

Jack turns back to the team. “This is Freddy. He owns the place.”

Freddy laughs and throws an arm around Jack’s shoulder. “You'll have to forgive me. Ever since Jack started bringing people here, we've been having some fun at their expense.”

“No hard feelings,” Mac says with a relieved chuckle.

“Hey, I'm just glad we're not gonna get murdered and eaten,” Bozer says. 

Jack grins at Freddy. “Well, this is my son, Mac, and his best friend Bozer, and you already know Riley.”

“Sure do. You still remember how to play this thing?” Freddy asks, holding out the banjo. Riley bites her lip but takes it from him and plucks out a few notes. He showed her the weekend she sprained her ankle badly on the first day of hiking and Jack had to bring her back out of the woods. Jack had insisted they didn’t need to cut their trip short though, and they’d spent the next two days at Freddy’s place, cooking out, listening to Jack and Freddy swap stories about Jack’s dad. Riley’d found out then for the first time that Freddy wasn’t just one of Jack’s random acquaintances, but that he’d served with Jack’s dad in Vietnam. It’s not something the man talks about much, and Riley gets the feeling he came up here because he couldn’t take being around people much afterward.  _ Everyone’s got their own ways of coping, and his seems to work. _ Between his chickens and goats and honeybees, Freddy seems pretty happy and fulfilled in his life, and Riley can’t think of anything better than that.  _ Maybe when I finally retire I should come up here. I think I could get used to raising goats. _ The baby one she bottle-fed that weekend still remembers her every year.

“You said son, so I’m guessing this isn’t just another training course to put some newbies through the grinder, huh?” Freddy says, nodding to Mac. Riley notices that the man accepted Jack’s introduction without so much as a raised eyebrow.  _ Guess he’s well aware of the Dalton family penchant for taking in strays.  _

Jack shrugs. “Well, little of both actually. Boze here’s new, Mac’s been trained before, but neither of them have seen the pure pristine wilderness out here.” 

“Well, it's been quiet ever since last week's rain. You have the whole place to yourself. And don't worry about that Jeep. She'll be fine right there.”

“All right.” Jack fishes the keys out of his pocket. “Well, I'll give you these.” He tosses them to Freddy, who catches them expertly. “All right, everyone. Keys, cell phones, wallets.”

“Goodbye, modern civilization,” Bozer says. 

Jack walks back to the jeep and pulls four backpacks out of the back of the vehicle. “Besides what you're wearing and the rain gear, you each get three things: a backpack, a canteen and a knife.” Jack chuckles. “Be glad…”

“...it isn’t CIA training,” Mac finishes with a groan. 

_ Right, Jack tells that story all the time when he’s training greenies.  _ Riley giggles slightly.  _ True, the mental image has scarred me for life but Jack’s always amusing.  _

“Riley, is that actually true?” Mac asks, turning to her and looking more than a little disturbed. “That you don’t get  _ anything? _ ”

“I can neither confirm nor deny any CIA training protocols,” Riley says. “What happens in training, stays in training. Including any and all trade secrets.” She raises an eyebrow. 

“You’re both just kidding us, right?” Bozer asks. 

“Nope, and I can prove it,” Jack says, starting to shed his jacket. Riley giggles. 

“Please don’t.” Bozer says, turning around. “I have seen too much of that already.” 

Jack chuckles, shrugging back into his coat. “Don’t worry, I’ll save it for the swimming hole.”

Bozer shivers, tugging at his gloves. “We’re not really going swimming in this, are we?”

“Gotta be prepared to survive anything,” Riley says.  _ I mean, we don’t  _ have _ to do it, but Jack and I have a standing bet on who can get brave enough to take the plunge first. _ And after three days of hiking it usually sounds pretty good, even when the water is chilly. 

She takes her knife out of its sheath to check it. It’s one of her tactical survival ones, a Christmas present from Jack her first year with DXS. She’s lost two of the set (well, not lost, she knows exactly where they are, or at least who she left the second one in) but she’s very fond of them. Jack hand-wrapped the grips to suit her exactly, and the weight of them is so familiar she can forget she’s holding one. 

“There a reason these backpacks are so big?” Bozer asks. “I mean, we're not taking much.”

“Yeah,” Mac says. “The extra space is for the stuff you're gonna pick up along the way that you'll need, like firewood and food. And if you stuff it with grass, it can make a good pillow, at least if you’re an old man like Jack.”

“Come on now, this ‘old man’ is gonna out-hike all of you this weekend,” Jack says, pulling Mac’s black beanie off to ruffle his hair. “Trust me, you'll be glad you brought them along.”

Jack glances back over his shoulder as they walk away. “All right, Freddy.See you in a couple days.”

“Don't be so sure,” Freddy says ominously.”Not everyone who walks in those woods...walks out.”

“He's way too good at that,” Bozer whispers. 

“Actually he’s messing with me,” Riley says. “One time I sprained my ankle and Jack had to carry me out. And now Freddy uses that line on everyone.” She chuckles, swinging her arms and staring up at the clear sky. She doesn’t intend to do anything stupid this trip, she plans on enjoying the time with her family.  _ It’s not often we get to do this. No bad guys, no danger, just us and the woods. _

* * *

WALKER GORGE

NEXT TO TEXAS, A LITTLE BIT OF HEAVEN ON EARTH

Jack stops in a small clearing, closes his eyes, and listens. He can hear his team’s footsteps behind him, he can even pick out which of them it is that’s walking. He knows Mac’s step pattern as well as he knows his own, and Bozer’s is fairly familiar as well, the slight shuffle that sends leaves skittering over the ground. Riley’s last, bringing up the rear as the other experienced woodsman, and her footfalls are almost as noiseless as a deer’s. 

Jack waits for his team to catch up, then opens his eyes. “Okay, everyone, stop, and breathe.”

“What?” Bozer asks. 

“Relax.” Jack shrugs. “We’re not out here to put you through the ringer and beat survival lessons into you, we’re out here to teach you to tune into what’s around you and learn how to use it. So that means not just charging through the brush, it means finding out what’s here. Look, listen, use your nose.” 

He learned his lesson from training Mac.  _ James forced him to memorize skills, learn them by rote repetition. And it didn’t work for the way Mac thinks. He never knows what he’s going to do until he gets where he’s going, which means it’s better to teach him general rules and then let him improvise the specifics. Teaching a person one way to start a fire and drilling that into them is totally useless if they’re in terrain that doesn’t have the same materials, or if they don’t have the same exact gear on them. _ Jack can start a fire almost twenty different ways, and now, so can Mac.  _ Some of them are different than mine, but hey, it works. _

Jack closes his own eyes. He can hear a red-shouldered hawk, far off and high up.  _ Following them can lead you to good places to set snares for small game.  _ There’s a kingfisher scolding, much closer, and also the sound of moving water.  _ And there’s a place to try catching some fish. _ Jack might have gotten teased in boot camp about being a bird nerd, but that knowledge has kept him alive more than once.  _ Following what can survive in a place usually means you’ll be able to survive too. If an animal is staying alive, it has sources of food and water. You just have to learn to find those too. _

“Running water. To our left, and downhill,” Mac says. 

“Birds, wind in the trees,” Bozer says. 

“Okay, ‘birds’ is a gross understatement, but we’ll have time to teach you about the finer points to wildlife identification later. And wind...what direction is that coming from?”

“Uh...Bozer frowns. 

“Survival isn’t about being the toughest. It’s about being the most adaptable, the most aware.” Jack says. “For example. The sun is your compass. Right now, it is to our backs, which means we're headed which direction, Riley?” 

“West.”

Jack grins and shoves her shoulder. He loves these trips with her, father-daughter bonding time is fantastic and much-needed. Out here, it doesn’t matter that they’re government agents with the training and scars to prove it. They’re just a family enjoying a weekend in the forest. 

“Very good. We are thirty miles from the nearest ranger station, seventy from the closest thing to civilization, so keeping your bearings out here is imperative, unless you want to become a permanent resident.”

“Would that be so bad?” Mac asks. Jack smiles sadly.  _ Definitely not for you, bud.  _ He thinks he’d happily live as a hermit the rest of his life if it kept Mac out of the hands of creeps and thugs. He’s had as many nightmares about what happened in Silver Wall’s holding cell as Mac has. 

“I know, right? It’s nice to get away from my computer screen for a while. It's really refreshing, honestly,” Riley says. 

Bozer grimaces. “Tell that to my stomach. That's not two bears you're hearing fighting. It's hunger pains.”

“So, what did you hear a minute ago that could help us?” Jack asks. “Remember?”

“I heard running water,” Mac replies. “A stream.”

“Exactly. Good work, kiddo,” Jack says, turning toward the source of the sound. 

“Gonna teach us how to fish, Jack?” Mac asks. 

Riley grins. “No, fishing has to wait till we can make some gear. Right now we’re foraging.” 

“Foraging what? Nothing out here to eat,” Bozer says. 

Maybe to city slickers like you,” Jack says. “But as Mac  _ ought _ to remember from his own training…” He frowns, recalling the camping trip that went so spectacularly wrong seems like a bad omen.  _ Superstitious, Dalton, that’s all you are. _ But he can’t quite forget the escaped criminal, the FBI agent hunting them, and Mac getting waterboarded in the basement of an old OPI blacksite. He shakes off the memories.  _ Not going to happen this time. _ “There's plenty out here to eat. You just got to know what's edible and where to look.”

Jack leads them to the stream and reaches for the stand of tall plants growing by the waters’ edge. “Cattails. They're the fast food of the wilderness.” he cuts a few stalks and hands them around. “One for you.”

“Ooh. Thank you.” Riley grins, biting into hers like Jack gave her a popsicle. Riley claims she’ll try anything once, which is why Uncle Bill now has to fight her for the plate of candied jalapenos at the Dalton family Christmas, why Jack’s hot sauces are always vanishing, and why Cage insisted she was going to have to lock the cupboard she put her Australian licorice in when she and Riley were roommates. Aside from her allergy to that one type of red dye in some sodas and food colorings, Riley will potentially eat anything. She’s more adventurous with local cuisine than Jack, always has been. And also equally adventurous with their foraging options, as long as she’s sure it’s not poisonous. 

Jack hands the stalks around the group. “One for you, and you.” He grins, taking a big bite out of his own. “Mmmm. De-licious.” 

Riley is happily chowing down on her own stalk, but Mac and Bozer look far less enthusiastic. Bozer grimaces and spits out the piece in his mouth. 

“Tastes like used Q-tips. If this was my secret ingredient on Iron Chef, I'd forfeit.”

“How do you know what used Q-tips taste like, Bozer?” Riley asks.  _ I was wondering that myself.  _

Well, sorry, guys, but you're gonna have to get used to them, because we each have to eat two hundred and forty per day to match the energy we're burning. So that's ten very important calories you just wasted.”

“I'm sorry, did you say  _ two hundred _ and forty?” Mac asks with a cough and a grimace. 

“Yep,” Riley replies with a chuckle. “But if you really don’t want yours, more for me.”

“You actually like these things?” Bozer asks.

“It’s like coffee, Bozer. Gross at first but necessary, and after a while you start liking it.” She chuckles. “Unless you’re Jack, who still calls it ‘stump water’.” 

“Which is actually an affront to stump water, which you might have the pleasure of experiencing this weekend,” Jack says. “You know, there’s been times I drank water out of a muddy hoofprint…”

“And been mighty glad to get it,” Riley finishes along with him, laughing. “I don’t think I’ve ever met one of you Texans who hasn’t drunk water out of a muddy hoofprint.”

“Thank you John Wayne,” Jack says with a chuckle. “Surviving in the woods ain't easy. That's why nobody comes out here.” He pushes aside a branch and steps into a clearing, then stops, frowning, at the sight of an abandoned campsite. 

“Actually, looks like someone did,” Mac says. He bends down and digs his fingers into the ashes. “These are still slightly warm underneath.”

“Guess Freddy was wrong. There are people out here.” Bozer says. 

Jack frowns, pacing around the circle. “Yeah. People who brought a lot of equipment but have no idea what they're doing. Can you tell me what mistakes they made, Mac?”

Mac bites his lip, looking around the campsite. “They didn't ring their fire with stones to keep it from spreading, one. They left cigarette butts, which is not only a fire hazard but violates the Leave No Trace rule.”

“Not to mention, extremely rude,” Bozer adds. 

“Yes. And they camped in a valley, which is a big no-no because of flash floods.” Mac says. “And also helps prove the campsite is fresh, because Freddy said it rained here heavily last week.” 

Jack smiles. “Very good, kiddo.”

“Only missed one thing.” Riley holds up a shred of cloth she’s pulled from the branch of a tree. “Cotton fibers. These definitely weren’t seasoned pros.”

“Why is that bad?” Bozer asks. 

“Well, out here, cotton kills,” Jack says. 

Mac jumps in with the explanation, and Jack suddenly wonders if the kid learned this by bitter experience when he was a vigilante. “It gets wet, and it stays wet, making you vulnerable to hypothermia every time it rains.” Jack shivers suddenly at the thought of a college-age Mac in a sweatshirt and jeans huddled on a roof or in an alley in a storm, getting colder and colder and more and more miserable but not willing to go home until he finished what he came to do. 

Riley nods. “That's why we're head-to-toe nylon and wool. Whoever did this, asking for trouble.”

* * *

THE WILDERNESS

BOZER IS DEFINITELY A CITY KID

By the time they stop for the night, Bozer’s legs are aching, his stomach feels both empty and a little queasy from the few cattails he’s forced down, and he thinks both his heels have blisters. But Jack warned him not to take his boots off to check until they camp for the night and he can elevate his legs, or his feet will swell. 

Riley seems as energetic as when they started the day, and Mac is his usual hyperactive self as well. The two of them scurry around the chosen campsite, making a fire ring, gathering wood, and starting a shelter out of fallen branches. Jack takes one look at Bozer and tells him to sit down, then starts showing him how to weave a simple rope. 

“Mac and Riley are gonna need this to hold the lean-to together.” 

Bozer’s grateful Jack is giving him a useful chore so it doesn’t feel quite so much like he’s the weak link in the team.  _ It’s not fun when you realize you’d be the first guy to get voted off ‘Survivor’ out here. _

Jack collects a handful of vines for Bozer, but stops mid-reach for something. “Guys, you all need to see this.” Bozer gets back on his feet, groaning, and hobbles over to where Jack is pointing to a plant with sets of three vaguely jagged-edged leaves. “Poison oak. Don’t touch this, and definitely don’t throw it on the fire. Ever. You do not want to inhale the fumes.”

“Yikes, good to know,” Bozer replies.

“There’s something else I want to show you before y’all walk away again,” Jack continues. “This fluff here is fireweed, which is something you’re all going to want. Key to starting a fire is tinder,” Jack says. “When you find dry leaves, branches, or this plant, stuff it in your backpack, pockets, jacket, wherever it’ll stay dry until you want it. It also doubles as an extra layer of insulation from the cold.”

Mac nods. “Pine needles are good for that too.” 

“A little prickly and uncomfortable, but yeah, he’s right,” Jack says. 

“Pine needles?” Bozer asks. 

“Yeah, learned that one by experience,” Mac says, grimacing. “It was a paradrop that went bad in the Carpathians. Jack and I got separated, and I messed up my knee really badly. And then it rained. I've never been that cold in my whole life.” Mac shivers. 

Jack raises an eyebrow. “What about Siberia, dude? I literally froze my ass off.”

"But you were with me that time.” Mac's voice is soft, almost sad. “Being alone felt so much colder.”

Jack puts an arm around Mac’s shoulder. “But you survived. And you even got a fire going so I could find you. Want to show these guys one of your many different ways to get sparks?”

“Soon as we get a fire pit set up,” Mac says. He bends down next to the heap of stones he and Riley have collected. 

“Okay. Rules for fire safety. Most people think only the fire can hurt you, but that’s not true,” Jack says. “Smoke inhalation can kill, you can scorch your lungs with breathing in air that’s too hot, and like I said, some plants can give off very toxic fumes. What else, kids?”

“Never ring your fire with striated rocks,” Riley says. “They absorb water and when that heats, it can cause them to explode.”

“Unless you want an explosion, then use a lot of them,” Mac says. “And Grandpa Harry used to throw pine nuts in the bonfire pit at home and they’d go off like gunshots. Good for distracting someone, if you have to.” 

“I should have known you’d break that rule on purpose,” Jack says. “You like things that blow up way, way too much.” 

Mac laughs, and Bozer grins. The cold squeezing around his heart that’s been there since Mac talked about being alone is starting to ease. Mac’s not alone now, and that’s what matters. 

* * *

THERE ARE NO BATHROOMS IN THE WASHINGTON WILDERNESS

UNFORTUNATELY

It’s dark, and cold, and Mac wishes he hadn’t woken up, that he could ignore this far to literal ‘call of nature’ as Jack’s been known to put it, and go back to sleep. But he knows he won’t be able to. Unfortunately, he can’t just roll out of bed and walk across his room to the bathroom. 

Mac shivers. The worst part of being out here is how vulnerable he feels at times like this. There’s no door to lock, not even a curtain. He steps just far enough into the woods that the trees hide him, but that there’s still a little gleam from the smoldering campfire. 

_ You’re all alone out here. The only people around are your friends, no one is going to hurt you. _ But it’s still a relief when he’s finished and can go back.

He can hear the little stream chattering down the rocks behind him, and he decides washing his hands will make him feel a little more like he’s at home and less like he’s sleeping in a makeshift shelter with branch walls and no door.  _ You’re jumping at shadows, Mac. _ But ever since they saw that other camp, he’s had the feeling of being watched. Not a feeling he’s fond of, after Murdoc. 

_ He’s not out here. _ But the truth is they don’t know where he is. Somewhere off the grid with Cassian, more than likely. The fact that they’ve heard nothing from him since that camera at Mac’s house is making Mac skittish.  _ He didn’t forget about me. Whatever he’s planning, it’s going to be elaborate and sick. _ And a kidnapping in the middle of the wilderness could easily be part of Murdoc’s idea.

The stream is further away than it sounded, and despite the cool moonlight, Mac is getting nervous. He can’t see the campfire anymore, and even though he literally just has to turn around and go straight back the way he came, he’s suddenly terrified of being lost out here. He’s about to turn around when his boot splashes into mud, and the gurgle of water sounds almost underfoot. 

He bends down, preparing to wash his hands clean in the stream, when he hears a crack. 

_ It’s just a wild animal. _ Not that that’s very reassuring either. There might be bears or wolves or mountain lions out here. 

A light clicks on, shining into his face, and Mac blinks, blinded. It’s definitely not one of his team. No one had flashlights. He stares squintingly past the glow into a face framed by a green coat and a hat that reads “Ranger”. He relaxes slightly.  _ Just the ranger Jack was talking about earlier. But what’s he doing out here? _

“Son, you shouldn’t be out here by yourself. There’s a rabid mountain lion out here.” The man says. “I’m trying to find everyone out here and alert them.”

Mac stands up, shivering.  _ Of course that’s our luck, get some creepy creature roaming around on the week we come camping.  _ He takes a couple steps toward the man, then stops.

Mac frowns. He can smell blood.  _ Why is that? _ It seems stronger near the ranger. If he’s a ranger at all.  _ That much blood… _ He could have killed someone and stolen his uniform.  _ That’s a plot straight out of one of Bozer’s movies.  _ But Mac has learned it’s better to be paranoid than sorry.  _ Even out here in the woods. _

“Listen, I wasn’t alone. I’ve got some friends, they should know that there’s a dangerous animal out here too.” The guy can’t refuse to warn other campers. If he really is the ranger he claims to be, then he’ll be obligated to help as many people as possible stay safe. Even if he’s a fake, and wants to maintain his cover, he’ll have to go along with Mac’s idea, and if Mac can get him back to the camp, Jack and Riley can take him, he’s sure of that. And if the guy refuses, then Mac can be sure that he’s not who he pretends to be, and try and plan a way out of this mess.

The man’s face is unreadable in the dark. “I’ve already told your friends, they’re on their way to the ranger station right now. We’ll catch up with them in a few minutes.”

Mac doesn’t like this. But he’s also afraid to argue. If this guy did kill someone, he’s armed and dangerous, and all Mac has is his SAK. And if not...he can’t afford to run off on his own in the woods with a dangerous predator on the loose. 

But even though it’s dark, and the moonlight is fading now, Mac can tell they’re going the wrong way. Jack pointed out the direction of the ranger station yesterday, and he’d indicated it was north of the streambed, up in the foothills of a peak, Mac noticed. They followed the stream to camp here, uphill, and the ranger is still traveling upward, higher and higher, along the streambed, and away from the direction Jack had pointed.

_ He’s not taking me to the station. He’s taking me somewhere to kill me quietly and hide the body. _ Mac’s sure of it. He takes a few steps backward. The flashlight is pointed ahead of them, maybe he can get enough of a head start into the trees that this guy won’t be able to catch him. And then he just has to follow the stream…

He turns around and starts running. Unfortunately, running in the woods isn’t exactly an easy thing at the best of times, and it’s even more difficult in the dark, with someone chasing you. Mac slides on leaves, trying not to slip and fall or slam into a tree trunk in the dark. He hears crunching behind him and turns around for a split second to try and see how close his pursuer is, and that’s of course when the giant fallen tree decides to appear in the middle of his path. 

Mac trips over the log and goes sprawling. He stifles a cry of pain and frustration as he’s yanked back to his feet, feeling the hard roundness of the muzzle of a gun pressed into his back.

“Try that again, and you’re going to be fertilizer.” The man pats him down, pulling everything out of his coat pockets and the knife out of his pants, wraps a length of what feels like rope around Mac’s wrists and pushes him forward. “Get moving, and no more tricks. Got it?”

Mac nods. He stumbles along in front of the man, walking blindly until he sees a light through the trees. The reddish flicker tells him it’s a campfire. He wonders if these are the people who set up that terrible camp he and the team stumbled across.

“Hey Gio, you know how you saw that smoke? I found whoever else is out here.” The man pushes Mac into the circle of firelight, and around it, Mac can see the faces of four more people. 

“Check him over. Probably just a hiker but you can’t be sure. He alone?”

“Said he had friends. Didn’t want to check out a whole camp alone, but I figure he can lead us back there and we can take care of ‘em all.” The man shrugs. “Could be poachers, might have some hefty firepower.”

“And he doesn’t?”

“He’s got nothing in his coat pockets,” The man replies. “Just a couple pill bottles.” Mac bites his lip, those are the medications he takes for the headaches and mood swings, he had to bring them along. 

“Check his pants.”

“Just this knife.” The man hands it over. 

A guy with a scruffy grey beard stands up, pulling out a gun of his own. “Okay, boy, this can be the easy way or the hard way. Lead us back to your friends, and make sure they don’t fight back, and everyone gets tied up and gets to take their chances with the mountain lions. Or you can argue, and I can shoot you in the gut and leave you for the vultures.” 

“If I lead you back to the camp you’ll kill all of us. I’m not helping you hurt my friends.” 

“Just shoot him,” A woman with black hair and a jean jacket says. 

Mac shudders.  _ Is this how I die? _

“It’s real simple, kid. You help us, or you suffer, got it?” The man shrugs. “Or we can go down there and get ourselves in a gunfight. Maybe all of us don’t walk away, but maybe your friends don’t either, capiche?” 

“No, don’t. They never saw you, right? They aren’t a danger to you,” Mac insists. “If you let them live, I’ll help you.”

“With what?” The fake ranger sneers. 

Mac looks toward the fire, and sees the crinkled paper on a log with a knife driven into it.  _ A map. _ “With getting to whatever it is at that X.” 

* * *

1700 MILES AWAY

Matty looks up at the unassuming brick suburban house, steeling herself for the conversation that has to come when she walks up to the door. But she has to have another one right now, with the agent in the driver’s seat, that she’s dreading almost as much. 

“Thank you for agreeing to come with me, Leanna.”

“Of course.” Leanna says. 

“I know I dragged you away from the group camping trip.”

“Not a big deal. Seriously. I mean, this is my job. Reigns was CIA, so it makes sense to have me on the relocation team.” 

Matty sighs.  _ Time for the truth here first.  _ It makes talking to Ethan feel less intimidating. After today, she’ll never have to see him again. But Leanna is one of her agents.  _ If I blow this, then I have to live with the fallout.  _ “I didn’t just as you as the CIA liaison. I asked you as a friend.” She looks over at Leanna’s face. “Something wrong?”

“I just...thought if you wanted a friend you’d ask Jack. Or Riley. Or someone who’s at least known you longer than a few months.” Leanna says. “I can only imagine how hard this is going to be for you, and I’ll be there however I can, I promise. I didn’t mean it to sound like I can’t, I just…”

“I know, and I appreciate that. But...this is about you, not me.” Matty swallows. “I want you to understand something about this life, Leanna. This is where it takes us. This is the way we end.” Matty says. “If we’re lucky.”

“Is this about me and Bozer?”

“Yes.” Matty sees no point in beating around the bush. “And before you say anything, every agent who’s ever had a relationship in the job thinks they’re the exception to the rules. The ones who are going to last.”

Leanna’s fingers are white-knuckled on the steering wheel. “You want me to stop seeing him. To keep this professional.”

“No, I didn’t say that.” Matty knows she’s not at her best today. Normally she’d handle her words better, but needing to talk to both Ethan and Leanna is overtaxing her. She’s emotional and exhausted and she wants to hide from the world for three days. But she can’t do that, because this is her job. And more importantly, these are the people she cares about, and she has to do hard things for them sometimes. “I just want you to be aware of what can happen. Because I never want you to be in my seat someday. I never want you to feel this pain. Even though I think it’s already too late.”

Leanna nods slowly. “I appreciate that, Matty.” Her grip on the steering wheel relaxes. “But I don’t need to be protected. I don’t need this spelled out for me either. I saw me and Bozer in you and Ethan from the first. And I have thought about things. It’s kept me up at night.”

Matty nods. 

“I know how this could end. But...I don’t want to sacrifice the happiness I feel now because of a fear of what the future could hold.” 

“I understand that. As long as you keep in mind that the future is uncertain, Leanna...I see no reason to make this harder.”

“Thank you, director.”

Matty steps out of the car, takes a deep breath, and walks up the sidewalk to the door, ringing the bell and stepping back. 

When the door opens, Ethan looks out, then down, and she sees his whole face change when he sees her. “Matty. What are you doing here?” 

“We need to talk.”

“You could've called,” He says. “Not that I’m not glad to see your face, but…”

“Honey?” The woman Matty remembers was his wife, Deena, glances out from behind the door. “Hi.”

“Hello.” Matty bites her lip at the sight of the little girl pressed close to Ethan’s legs. 

“Matty, is everything okay?” Ethan asks.

“No. That's why we're here. May I come in?” Ethan nods, and Matty walks in. She declines the chair Ethan offers. This is best told standing. She needs to remain strong. 

“Ethan, we intercepted a communication from a known S-Company affiliate to the effect that your location is now in their hands and that there is a five million dollar contract on your head. My people responded to the offer, and accepted the deal to keep another interested party off the scent, but Ethan Reigns needs to be dead by the end of the day. Which is why we’re moving you and your family into a more secure level of witness protection.” 

Ethan sighs, scrubbing his hands over his face. “I don't understand. We followed protocol. We didn't leave a trail. My family is just settling into a normal life. How did this happen?” 

“All I can tell you is S-Company learned your location. It's no longer safe here.” Ethan leans forward with a groan. “Listen, Ethan, you gave the CIA massive amounts of intel that led to shattering S-Company rings across the globe. They're looking to make an example out of you and your family. This is not up for debate. Okay? We're going.”

Ethan looks up, and Matty can see the resignation in his too-familiar eyes. “When do we leave?”

* * *

_ Fifteen year old Jack leans back on his hands, watching the fire crackle and the horses stomp and swish their tails. Midnight in Texas is comfortably cool, there’s a bite to the air that tells him the crisper winter nights are approaching, but for now, insects are singing in the tall grass and warmth still rises from the sun-baked earth.  _

_ Pops pulls the stick he’s been using to arrange the fire out and points up to the night sky. “Okay, Jackie. Tell me what you see.” _

_ “Well, there’s Orion. And Taurus. The constellation, not Connors’s breeding bull.” Jack laughs. “And there’s the dippers and the North Star.” _

_ “Yep, good work, son,” Pops says with a smile. “Keep your eyes up there, and you’ll never be lost. You just gotta remember to keep looking up.” _

Jack rolls over and gets a faceful of dirt and leaves that smell distinctly not-Texasy. He blinks awake, eyes adjusting to the grey dawn light.  _ Right. Camping trip. Family. Washington. _ He licks his lips and grimaces at the taste in his mouth.  _ Brushing your teeth with a twig just doesn’t cut it. _ Even cattails would be better than this ‘something died in here’ taste. 

He yawns. It’s later than he expected to wake up, but hiking all day yesterday did tire him out, more than he wants to admit.  _ So what? I am getting older, nothing to be ashamed of. But I’m not about to let my kids pick on me for it. _

He glances over at Riley, who’s curled up into a ball with one hand tucked under her cheek. She looks so peaceful and happy, and Jack smiles, reaching out to brush one tangled curl, complete with a twig of some weed they’ve walked through, off her cheek. 

He rolls over to look for his other kid, and stops. Mac’s not there. Jack sits bolt upright, no longer the least bit lazy. “Mac!”

Something skitters away in the leaves, and Riley and Bozer both jerk awake, panting and wide-eyed, but there’s no answer from the campsite or the woods.

“Mac!” Jack jumps up, spinning in a circle. The kid shouldn’t be far enough away that he can’t hear Jack yelling.

“Riley, Bozer, did you see him?” Jack asks. He knows his voice is too sharp, but he also knows there will be time to ask forgiveness later. 

“No.” Riley’s voice is tight with worry. “Slept like a log.”

“Me too,” Bozer says. “Where would he go?”

“I don’t know!” Jack snaps, turning around again. “He wouldn’t just wander off, that’s not how he does things.” Jack can’t shake the horrible thought of the kid leaving the campsite for something innocuous, walking off in the trees to take a leak or something, and getting attacked by a wild animal or falling and knocking himself unconscious.  _ But an animal we would have heard. _ But if Mac fell and hit his head on a rock...in the dark…

“Guys, fan out and look around the campsite, in the woods. He can’t have gone far.”

“I got footprints over here,” Riley says. “Mac’s boot tread. Looks like he went into the trees here.” She motions Jack and Bozer over. Jack nods, looking down. The print and size are right to be Mac’s foot, and they’re outside the area where everyone was trampling around prepping camp last night. 

“There’s no set coming back,” Bozer says.

“No, but these go deeper in, toward the stream,” Jack says, forging ahead through the brush, trying not to think about Mac slipping on slick, wet rocks, drowning in the shallow water because he fell face first and knocked himself out. Even the thought that the kid could have twisted an ankle or something and been lying down here half in and half out of the chilly water all night is better than imagining him dead.

But there’s nothing when Jack reaches the stream. No Mac, not even a scrap of cloth. And then he sees it, on the other side of the water. Two sets of prints. One Mac’s. One bigger.

“Damn it!” He shouts. “Someone took him.”

“Someone kidnapped Mac?” Bozer asks. 

“Looks like it.” Riley reaches down to pick up a cigarette butt. “Just like we found at that campsite yesterday. Whoever those people were, it looks like Mac is with them.”

“Maybe something happened and he’s just helping?” Bozer asks weakly. “You said they were underprepared and didn’t do things right, maybe they needed help and he went along?”

“I don’t think so. He’d have come back and told us,” Jack says. “Mac doesn’t go off alone with strangers, not anymore.”  _ At least we know Murdoc’s not a smoker. Still, doesn’t rule out the possibility of hired mercs. _ Jack wouldn’t put anything past that monster, including knowing where Mac is at all times. 

“Listen. I’m going to follow those tracks and check things out,” Jack says. ‘Might be nothing, might be bad. Riley, stay with Bozer.” She nods, and Jack sees her fingers curl around the handle of her knife. She’s trained in wilderness survival just like Jack. She’ll keep Bozer safe. “You two go get help, okay?”

“Bring him home, Jack,” Riley says, and Jack plunges away through the trees with those words echoing in his ears. 

* * *

Riley watches Jack disappear into the trees. “Okay, Boze, let’s go get help.”

“So we’re just going to let Jack go fight God knows how many people single-handedly?” Bozer asks. 

Riley shrugs, feeling the weight of responsibility settling onto her shoulders. “Best not to argue, Bozer. He's going AMOS on us.”

“Don't you mean AWOL?”

“No. Advanced Mountain Operations School. Jack wasn't kidding when he said he'd out-hike us all on this trip.” Riley shakes her head. “Jack’s the best tracker and bushcraft agent in Phoenix. And if we tag along we risk making things harder for him. He’s fast and quiet.”

“But I could get help and you could go, you’re trained…”

Riley shakes her head. “I can’t leave you alone out here, Boze. I know you passed spy school, but wilderness training is different. You could get lost easily, and we can’t be worried about you roaming around out here trying to find the ranger station, while we’re worried about Mac too. Jack will be fine. I’ll stay with you and we’ll get help.” As much as she hates this splitting up thing, Jack is right. He’s the best at finding and rescuing Mac, and Bozer needs to stay with someone with training. And someone needs to be alerted that things have gone horribly, horribly wrong. “Our best shot is to get somewhere we can contact authorities, get a heat signature searching chopper in the air.” 

“But I thought we were thirty miles from help?” Bozer asks.

“A little less since we were traveling at an angle in the valley yesterday. But yeah, sort of. So we should get started.” She looks up at the sky, then around at the landmarks.  _ Ranger station is due north of that peak up there across the river. So we should start moving northwest. _

She starts off at a brisk but sustainable pace, moving through the trees with practiced ease. Behind her, she can hear Bozer scuffing along.

“Roll your feet, outside of the sole in, when you step down. It’s less noisy.”

He nods, and Riley can immediately tell the difference. She can hear birds in the trees and some sort of animal in the undergrowth now. The sound is too skittery to be a threat, probably a squirrel or chipmunk. 

The sun rises higher, and Riley polishes off the water in her canteen. She’s about to suggest they find a stream, when the sky becomes overcast with charcoal clouds and opens up overhead. She and Bozer take shelter under the overhang of a bluff, and Riley uses her rain jacket to collect enough water to half-fill each canteen. 

Once the storm is over, they set out again. Riley checks her bearings often against the pale disk of sun showing behind silvery clouds, and the mountain range she’s using as a guide to keep moving in a straight line. She’s looking up quite a bit, but she’s also keeping her eyes on the terrain in front of her. Which is when she sees something that sends a chill deeper into her bones than any rainy wind. 

“Hey, I got blood over here.” Riley says.  _ Damn it, please don’t end how I think it will. _ She can’t help but worry that whoever they’re dealing with got here before she and Bozer did.  _ It could be just a wild animal’s kill, but... _

“Some here too, looks like a trail,” Bozer mumbles. “You don’t think…”

“Not unless they backtracked. This is old, see how the rain’s washed some of it away?” Riley asks, pointing. She looks up. “I think we’re fairly close to the ranger station now.” 

“Um, Riley?” Bozer asks. “I think...I think this is the ranger.” He sounds like he’s about to vomit. Riley bites her lip, but walks over to where Bozer is crouched behind a fallen log, a few steps to the side of the trail. At first she can’t see anything, but then she glances down into the hollow below the roots, and flinches. 

The body is naked aside from a pair of underwear, skin pale against the leaves and mud. Riley shudders, blinking away the thought of it being Mac lying there. The hair is too dark,with some grey at the temples, the muscles too defined, but she can’t help thinking of the sick photos Murdoc sent of Mac huddled in a corner in one of his hiding places, his skin almost glowing against the darkness.  _ We’re going to get him back. We’re not going to find him dead out here like this. We won’t. _

“Damn it!” Riley mutters. “They must have run into him, shot him, and taken his uniform and his radio. Now one of them looks like a ranger themselves. Probably how they lured Mac away.” She looks down at the body one last time, before starting to pick up a handful of stones and dirt. “The body is still fresh, and there’s...um...minimal damage from wild animals. Which means this happened not that long ago. Probably not long before we hiked in here.” 

“So what now?”

“Well, it looks like they stopped at the ranger station itself, which means they probably disabled or destroyed any way of calling for help from there. And I have to assume that if they have a ranger’s radio, they’ll be tuned into the emergency frequencies. Which means even if I could fix the gear at the station, if we try to alert authorities…”

“They could kill Mac.”

“Exactly. So I think his best chance is if we find Jack, rendezvous with him, and take these guys down ourselves.”

“How?” Bozer asks. “You have  _ one _ knife.”

“Bozer, I don’t need a knife.” Riley says, and she sees the second his eyes go from admiration to shock and a little bit of fear.  _ I think it’s easy for him to forget that I’m just as much a trained killer as Jack. _ Riley doesn’t find it necessary to call on her skills that often, Jack makes sure of that.  _ Jack, Cage, Patty...even Matty seem more dangerous than me. But that’s the thing. Everyone underestimates me, until it’s too late.  _ And if she has to snap a man’s neck to save Mac’s life, she’ll do it without a second thought. No matter how many nightmares it gives her. _ _

Jack’s job isn’t just to protect Riley and his team from bad guys with guns. It’s to protect them from having to do what he does. From having to have that blood on their hands. 

“How are we going to catch up with them?”

“They were traveling uphill. This area has a lot of treacherous climbs, things you can’t do without specialized equipment. And the way that campsite we found was set up, these guys were not prepared. Which means the land is going to bottleneck them at one of two spots, both of which are in a half-mile radius. And those...are about eight miles that way.” Riley points. “We’ve been traveling at an angle to Jack’s route, so we’ve covered some of the same distance. But we need to get moving. Now.” 

* * *

SOMEWHERE IN NEBRASKA

Matty grimaces at the strained sound of Ethan’s voice in the back seat. “This part of Nebraska we're going to is really beautiful. It's full of rolling hills and tranquil streams. You're gonna love it. Mara will, too. We're gonna have a beautiful life there.”

“Um-hm.” Deena’s only answers have been that sort, the brief acknowledgements that her husband has said something, but not wanting to engage with it. Matty’s sure the woman is stressed and angry. 

“I’m gonna stop here and refill the car,” Leanna says, breaking the tension inside the vehicle while pulling the SUV over into a roadside gas station. Matty thinks it looks like the kind of place Jack tends to pick, where he’ll go inside and buy snacks and complain about the jerky selection. 

“Sounds good.” Matty turns to Ethan and the others in the backseat. “Want to get out and stretch your legs?”

The little girl, who she’s learned is named Mara, nods. “Are there puppies?” She asks suddenly, crawling half over her mother’s lap to look out the window. “I see puppies!” Matty looks over to where someone with two brown and white spaniels is taking advantage of the dog run space beside the parking lot. “Can I pet them?”

“You can ask,” Ethan says, chuckling, starting to unbuckle his daughter from her seat as Leanna pulls up to a pump. Everyone gets out, and Matty watches Mara race across the grass to the dog run, her mother following her as fast as she can. 

Ethan steps up beside Matty, where she’s leaning on the corner of a firewood stack and watching Mara playing with the dogs, whose owner is chatting with Deena and seems to be laughing at the antics of her dogs and this stranger’s child. 

“How are Deena and Mara doing?” Matty’s heard the conversations in Cypriot Greek coming from the back seat. Deena and Mara both speak fairly clear English, but Matty got the feeling the conversation was intended to be private between the family. 

Ethan sighs, rubbing his face. The line of tattoos on his neck only highlight the muscle tension and twitching there. “Confused. Scared. Angry. About as good as can be expected.”

“I’m sorry. But it’s better that than them dead.”

“So, how did S-Company find us?” Ethan asks. 

Matty shakes her head. “You know I can't tell you that.”

“You're serious? You remember that I had a higher clearance than you, right?” 

“Now you don't. Ethan, you're out. So, as awkward and complicated as this is, I need to treat you like any other civilian going into witness protection.”

“Except I'm not like any other civilian, Matty. Because if I were, then the director of a top secret intel agency would not be personally handling my relocation assignment. And all I want to know is, should I be afraid that I am somehow putting my family in danger?”

“You're right. Our situation is unique. But the fact that we were married doesn't mean that I can just throw out U.S. government…”

Matty stops and looks up at the sound of shoes on pavement, and Ethan turns around.

“Deena…”

“You were married?” She whispers, face blanching.

“Deena, I’m so sorry, I should have told you.” Matty watches, frozen, as the woman turns away.  _ What have we just done? _

* * *

Mac stumbles along what passes for a path, tasting the salty copper tang of blood in his mouth. No matter what he’s done to try and placate these people, he’s still earned himself a couple punches to the face and more in his stomach. These guys, especially their leader, are strung out and frustrated, lashing out over every little thing. 

The leader shoves him in the back, and he stumbles, going down on one knee on the path. The motion sends a shock of pain through his leg, hip, and back, and he barely contains a groan. 

Thunder rumbles, and Mac hears the pattering sound of rain hitting leaves.  _ Damn it, I thought Jack said we were supposed to have decent weather this weekend. _ But there’s a haze of grey above the trees, and to the west a thick line of charcoal-colored clouds is moving toward them.

The rain gets thicker and heavier, moving from a vague rustle in the leaves to an incessant patter, then a numbing whooshing. Behind him, Mac hears someone curse and the sounds of hands rubbing damp fabric. Probably the guy who only had a thermal henley and no coat. 

“Damn, Gio, I think we should stop and wait this out,” Someone says, and Mac can hear a shudder of cold in the voice. 

“We can’t stop. Here, take this.” The man yanks Mac’s jacket half off his shoulders. Mac shivers at the feeling of someone else’s hands on his clothes. “What’s the matter, kid? You said you wanted to help. Or do I gotta go back and get your friends to convince you to do what we say?” Mac sighs and allows his hands to be untied, the coat worked off his back, and his gloves taken as well. The leader, who must be ‘Gio’, hands the coat to the guy in the black henley, and the gloves to the woman, who’s been rubbing her hands together and blowing on them. “Stop complaining, and let’s move.”

Mac takes a few more stumbling steps, feeling mud coating his shoes and sucking down, weighting his legs down and making every step that much harder. Some of it’s so deep that it’s covering the tongue of his boots, moisture leaking past the lacing and soaking his socks. With his jacket and gloves gone, he’s freezing. He wasn’t any too warm to begin with, and now, with rain falling, he can’t stop shivering. 

“We need to stop and build a fire, dry out our clothes,” He says, trying not to let his teeth chatter. 

Gio growls. “Don’t have time for that.”

“Well, you definitely don’t have time for hypothermia,” Mac snaps back. He’s cold, and wet, and miserable, and even though he can’t tell exactly what time it is, with the sun blocked out by the rolling grey clouds, he knows it’s been too long since he took any of the medications he’s supposed to. “Besides, we should stop and get some fresh water anyway.”

“We’ll stop when we’re there.” Gio shoves him, and Mac stumbles, falling to his knees again. Mud soaks the knees of his pants and splatters his face. 

A chilly wind whips Mac’s face, fluttering his damp shirtsleeves and blowing the wet edges of his hair. If he wasn’t cold already, now he’s freezing. He struggles to his feet, shaking. 

“Hey!” There’s a shout from ahead of them, and Mac sees someone stumble backward, catching themselves against a tree. “Damn it! Gio, something’s wrong!”

“Looks like it’s time for you to start earning your keep, boy,” Gio says. “Go figure it out.”

Mac shivers, walking up to the spot where the group started having trouble. The guy who tried to start climbing a wall of boulders is leaning against the rocks, looking up at them with a frown.

Mac tries to remember what Jack said on the way up about the risks of hiking out here.  _ Oh, right, ice. _ “The rain got these rocks wet, and because they’ve held the cold from last night, now it’s frozen into an invisible layer of ice,” Mac says. “We should go around.”

“Will that take longer?” Gio asks. 

“Yeah, a little bit, but it’ll take us just as long to get over these rocks without the right gear.” 

“What gear?” One of the other men asks. 

“Boot crampons, climbing rope…” Mac frowns.  _ The longer you stall in one place, the longer Jack and the team have to find you. They'll be tracking this group for sure, these guys are inexperienced and leaving a major trail. Going around means we keep moving. Climbing means we’re stopped more or less in one spot.  _ “You know, I can make some of that.”

“You can?”

“Yeah, but I'm gonna need my knife and all the zippers from the tents.”

Gio pulls Mac’s knife out of his pocket, slapping it into Mac’s outstretched hand. “All right.”

“You sure?” The woman asks. 

“What's he gonna do with this toy?” Gio says, shrugging. “We got guns.” 

Mac starts taking apart the tents, working as slowly as he can while not pissing these people off.  _ Jack, where are you? Come on, come find us. _

But the boot grips are finally finished, with no sign of Jack or anyone else coming to the rescue. Mac sighs slightly as he gets to his feet, handing around the straps he’s made and demonstrating how to lace them around his own boots. 

“All right, these should give your boots extra traction. But it's still dangerous, so take small steps.” He rests one hand on the rocks. “I’ll go first. I’ll find handholds and figure out a way up, and you’ll have to follow me, okay?” Mac figures rockface can’t be all that different from parkour on city buildings.  _ That’s probably asking for trouble, though, isn’t it? _

Gio frowns. “Listen, you get any funny ideas about running off, you’re gonna get a bullet in your back, got it? Cause all my little lead friends run a lot faster than you, boy.” Mac nods. “On second thought, I don’t trust you that much. Cid, you’ve climbed. You go first.”

The man with shoulder-length curly hair nods, and starts up the rockface, shoving off from the trunk of a small sapling growing nearby. But his foot slides, and he tumbles backward, leg caught in the v of the branches, groaning. 

“Cid?” Gio asks.

Mac kneels beside the man, helping him tug his ankle out of where it’s wedged. The man grimaces and curses as his foot pulls free. 

Mac looks up at Gio. 

“We have to stop. His ankle’s sprained, and it’s bad. If we don’t elevate that foot, he’s going to end up with even worse swelling. I’ll find something to make a splint to stabilize his leg and crutch so he can walk, but it’s going to take some time, so we might as well get that fire started now and work on some fresh water.” 

Gio nods, then points to the man with longer black hair, who tried to go up the rocks first. “Go with him.”

Mac glances around, locating a tree he thinks should have branches the right size for what he wants. He’s bending over to pick one up when a shot rings out. He jumps up, half expecting to feel blood pouring from somewhere in his body. But when he turns to look, Gio is standing over his wounded teammate, tucking his gun back in his belt. 

“What did you do?” Mac gasps. 

“You said he was going to slow us down.” Gio’s voice is terrifyingly calm. “Now show me how to get up those rocks. Or you’re next.” 

* * *

Jack grimaces against the biting pelt of rain against his face. Normally he’d take shelter and wait this weather out, but Mac’s in trouble and Jack can’t afford to waste a moment.  _ Those guys who have him are amateurs, this weather will slow them down, maybe give me a chance to catch up. _ The rain is actually excellent cover, both visual and audible. Jack can move faster through the woods when his footsteps could be mistaken for rain on the forest floor. 

The rain finally tapers off, leaving behind a raw, misty chill that seems to soak into Jack’s bones, despite the fact that he’s sweating through his clothing. He wonders how Mac is holding up. The kid hates being damp and cold, and very likely he’s both, right now. 

A gunshot splits the silence. Jack feels colder than ever, but his numb legs start working even faster, even as his mind begins reeling.  _ No, no, no. _ Mac can’t be dead. They can’t have killed him.

He’s already pinpointed the source of the sound, and the echoing report of the gun only confirms it. Fraser’s Bluff.  _ They’d have to be insane to try and cross those rocks right now. Damn it, I wonder if Mac remembered what I said and started arguing with them. _ Jack curses himself for his own advance warning as he stumbles on. 

It takes far too long to reach the spot where the shot came from. Jack is exhausted, panting, and as soaked with sweat as he was with rain by the time he reaches the area. He forces himself to slow down, to listen and approach with caution in case anyone’s still around. But when he creeps forward far enough to see the blood on the rocks, all caution leaves him, and he crashes out of the undergrowth into the open space below the bluff. 

Jack freezes. The blood trail leads to the edge of the cliff and vanishes.  _ God no, Mac, no. _ Jack doesn’t even want to look. Doesn’t want to see his boy broken and cold at the bottom of that cliff. 

But he has to know. He creeps to the edge and glances over, and the air leaves his lungs in a grateful gasp as he falls back. 

It’s a sick relief to see that it’s not Mac down there. The long black hair is an immediate giveaway.  _ But if they were willing to do this to one of their own, it’s only a matter of time before the next body is Mac’s.  _

He glances down again. The man is sprawled out, face up, and there’s something connected to his belt, something gleaming yellow and plasticy against the grime and leaves smeared across the body.  _ A radio. _

It’s fifty feet to the bottom of that cliff, but the body caught on a ledge that’s thirty down. And the cliff wall is only sheer if you’ve never been here before. Jack has climbed up and down that rockface a hundred times, there are multiple little handholds and crevices. It only takes him ten minutes to scramble down to the lower shelf where the body is lying, and pull off the radio. It’s a consumer version, not the high-powered type Phoenix agents usually carry, but he might still be able to work some magic with it. 

Jack yanks the back of the radio off.  _ Mac’s not the only one who gets to destroy communication devices.  _ Jack’s tuned more than a few off the shelf radios to Delta, Phoenix, or CIA emergency channels. That’s saved his butt in more than one botched exfil. He hopes it’ll work now.

He tunes to the emergency Phoenix network and starts sending a message. “This is Jack Dalton. I have an emergency situation, please respond.” There’s nothing but static. He continues to play with the wires, but nothing comes through.

This crappy little radio’s signal strength is terrible, and the weather isn’t helping, the inner workings are getting damp. Jack curses. This radio’s probably only made to communicate with other radios nearby.  _ But the ranger station might be close enough.  _ He frowns, trying to remember the frequencies listed on the chart on the side of Freddy’s kitchen fridge.  _ Got it. _

This time, when he tunes in, a voice answers. “Hello, Walker Gorge Ranger station, Mr. Dalton. What’s your emergency?”

“A friend of mine’s been kidnapped. Unknown number of assailants, but definitely armed.” 

“Okay, sir, tell me exactly where you are.”

Jack blinks. Something about this conversation has seemed off since he started talking to the man. He knows the guy who Freddy said was working up here this rotation, and the voice seems wrong, and he should know Jack already, they’ve stopped at the ranger station with Riley before. 

“Sure thing, man. And can you get a message to Bobby at the trailhead? Owns the gas station?”

“Absolutely.” 

Jack drops the radio, smashing it under his foot.  _ Wrong answer. That’s Freddy, and you should know it.  _ And now, despite the fact that he didn’t tell the man anything, he’s just given away his location.  _ They would know I got the radio off the guy they shot. And they know I’m coming after them.  _ Jack jumps to his feet, staring up at the cliff wall.  _ Damn, this climb’s gonna be no picnic. But I got to move.  _

* * *

Mac is exhausted, sweaty, and aching by the time the climb is over. But Gio refuses to let him or any of the others rest. Instead, he yanks Mac roughly back to his feet when he tries to sit down. “Come on. Anyone who heard that shot is going to be coming our way. We can’t stick around.” 

Mac grimaces, but pulls himself back to his feet, forcing one foot in front of the other even though his leg muscles are screaming for rest.  _ Think on the positive side. If you sat down, your muscles would cool and tighten, this is good for them, right? And walking will help you stay warmer.  _ Already, the heat from exertion is fading, leaving him chilled and shaking in clinging, sweaty clothes.  _ Wool and nylon help, but they still need to dry out.  _

He manages to keep up a trudging pace for what feels like an hour more, before they stop again and Gio pulls out the map, spreading it on a stump.

“How much farther?” One of the men, the fake ranger, asks. 

“Two miles, as the crow flies.” 

“Yeah, but it's gonna be a one-way trip if we don't stop to collect water,” Mac says. He can feel himself getting dehydrated. His head aches worse than ever, his mouth feels dry, and his eyes feel gritty. 

“When we get there,” Gio replies.

“And if our muscles cramp from dehydration before we get there, you gonna shoot everybody?” Mac asks. “We’re not going to make it that far without water.” He glances at the map, then taps his finger against a blue line visible near their current location. “Look, you can send your people down here to this stream to collect the water. But don't drink it yet. It’s not safe.”

“And you're gonna make it drinkable? How?” The second man asks, the one who has Mac’s coat.

“I just need my knife, a pine tree branch, and...one of these sleeping bag stuff sacks.”

Gio nods. “All right. You heard him. Fill up every bottle we got. Get to it.”

“Not every bottle,” Mac hastens to correct him. “Half of them. I need the other half clean, for the clean water.” He glances around. “And I need to find a pine tree with branches the right diameter to jam into the bottle openings.”

“Okay.” Gio keeps the gun on Mac the whole time he selects and cuts branches. Mac was hoping he’d be able to get a branch and knock the gun out of the man’s hand and then run while the others were at the stream, but he knows he’s too dehydrated to get far. And if Jack couldn’t find him, he could die out here, slowly. Besides, Gio is staying out of reach of any of the branches Mac can find. 

“We’ll need a fire for this. I’m not kidding, we have to build one now,” Mac says as he collects the pieces of wood he wants.

“Fine, do it quick, keep it small. No smoke. If it looks like you’re making a signal, I have no problem putting a bullet in your head, got it?”

Mac nods, and gets to work striking a flame with the flint that through some miracle is still attached to his knife. Everything is wet, but he manages to find a handful of leaves and some grass protected from the worst of the rain by a fallen log, and a small amount of the fluff from the fireweed plant Jack pointed out that Mac must have shoved in his pants pocket yesterday after Jack’s advice about saving what you find. The fire struggles at first, and takes more than one attempt to catch, but eventually there’s a decent small blaze, enough for what Mac needs, and enough to warm his hands just a little. He wishes he could make it bigger and dry his clothes out, but he knows Gio will see a larger blaze as a threat. 

He’s just finished cutting chunks of wood to size when the others return with the water bottles. Mac connects each bottle of dirty water to one of the empty clean ones with the piece of pine, then wraps a section of the sleeping bag sack around the hourglass center, shrinking it with the heat from the fire. 

He hangs each bottle from vine cord, watching the water trickle slowly through the wood and into the clean bottles. He jumps when the woman with the rifle kneels beside him. But she seems more interested in what he’s working on, than in him. 

“Are you sure it's safe?”

“Absolutely.” Mac learned this trick from Jack on their first trip together. “The xylem in the pine branches pulls out any harmful bacteria. Trees don't like drinking dirty water any more than people do.”

He taps one of the bottles gently, setting it swinging. The woman rubs her hands together. She’s still wearing Mac’s gloves, but it doesn’t look like that helped all that much. Mac noticed she seems the least enthusiastic of the group, especially after what happened back at the bluffs.

“How long have you known Gio?” Mac asks. 

“A few years.”

“Longer than that guy he just shot back there?”

“No. Gio and Cid go way back. Why do you ask?” She frowns. 

“If Gio was willing to shoot that guy he's known for years over possibly slowing him down a little, what do you think he's gonna be doing to you when he doesn't need you anymore?” Mac asks quietly.

The woman laughs. “Wow. You are too cute. Hey, Giovanni. This guy is trying to get me to turn on you.”

Go looks up. “Really? Did it work, Emma?”

She raises her rifle and points it at Mac. “Ask me to pull the trigger, and I'll happily prove my loyalty.”

Gio steps up and pushes her gun aside. “Tempting, but not now. We still need him.” 

“He’s stalling, slowing us down,” Emma says. “I bet he wants to build a fire so he can lead his friends to us.” 

Gio gives Mac an unreadable stare. “Can't say I blame you for trying, kid. Punishment, however, will have to wait for later. If your water's finally done, let's get moving.” He turns to the others. “Come on. Pack up.”

There’s a buzz of a radio sounding, and the fake ranger pulls his off his belt. “Hello?”

“Can anyone hear me? This is Jack Dalton, US intelligence. I have an emergency situation, please respond.”

The familiar voice is such a relief that Mac almost collapses.  _ Jack’s on our trail, he’s coming after me.  _ But the hope is short-lived. 

“Hmm, you didn’t tell me your friend was a cop,” Gio says with a frown. “You too?”

“Not exactly,” Mac says, breathing shallowly, praying this doesn’t earn him a bullet. 

“Take care of this problem.” Gio says. “Answer him, find him, and deal with it.” He glances at Emma. “And you said swinging by the ranger station was going to be a waste of time. 

Mac begins to struggle, but the taller man grabs off his hat and shoves it over his mouth. Mac bites and kicks and struggles, but it doesn’t do any good.  _ Jack, please, don’t fall for this. Please, realize it’s a trick. _

“He hung up on me!” The man with the radio says. 

“Go. He must have gotten that radio off of Cid. Find him and take care of him,” Gio says. “Then meet us.”

Mac breathes a tiny sigh of relief as he’s released and pushed forward.  _ Jack can deal with that guy. I know he can. _

* * *

FRASER’S BLUFF

THEY’VE MISSED EVERYONE BUT A DEAD GUY

“Damn, you think he fell?” Bozer asks.

“No,” Riley replies. She glances at the ground. “Blood trail. Someone shot him and then threw him over.” 

“Looks like this didn’t bottleneck them so much after all,” Bozer says.

“It would have had to slow them down,” Riley replies. “And now we know we’re on their track again.” She kicks the shards of plastic and metal lying on the ground. “Someone broke his radio, too. Guess maybe they wanted to make sure no one who found him could use it.” 

Bozer just nods. He’s hungry and cold, but most of all he’s scared. Mac is out there somewhere with people who are willing to shoot their own teammates, and ambush forest rangers.  _ He’s strong, he’s got to still be alive. _

“So do we keep going?” Bozer asks.

“Yeah,” Riley says, looking up at the rockface. “This is going to be fun.” She looks back at Bozer. “Follow my footsteps exactly. Okay? Do what I do, use the same handholds. I’ve climbed this before, it’s no picnic but we can do it.”

Bozer nods. “Here we go. The “Cliffs of Insanity”. Does this make you Inigo Montoya?”

“Only if it makes you Wesley.”

“Um, he sort of mostly died, so I’ll pass.” 

Riley scrambles up the rocks like Spider-Woman, and Bozer follows, much more clumsily but at least making it.  _ That dude didn’t fall, he got shot. I’m gonna be fine. It’s not an omen. Not at all. _

“I need a break,” Bozer pants when Riley helps haul him over the top of the ledge. 

“Okay. We’ll use that time to boil some water,” Riley replies. She’s filled her own canteen at a stream they crossed, but left Bozer’s empty, so she can put the water in a clean container after she purifies it, she explained. “Boiling will at least kill anything really nasty in it. It might still be kind of gritty and not taste great, but that stream was pretty clean.”

Bozer nods. “I think I can get a fire started.”

“Great. Get it hot fast, we want as little smoke as possible.” Riley glances at the ground. “I think we’ve picked up Jack’s trail too. That’s his boot print over there.” 

“Great,” Bozer says. “We’re all going the same way.” He sighs. “I just hope we actually get there.” His legs feel like jello. 

“We will.” Riley says gently. “We’re gonna find Mac and get him back, Bozer. I promise.” 

All Bozer can do is nod.

The fire is blazing and the canteen is bubbling when Riley suddenly jumps. “Boze. Shhh.” He stops humming and frowns. All he can hear are birds in the trees. And then he picks out the crunch-shuffle of feet in the leaves. Someone is coming. 

“Too much to hope that’s Jack coming back to check in, right?” Bozer asks. 

Riley nods, slithering on her stomach to the edge of the cliff and glancing over. “Whoever this is came a different way back. Must have gotten a little lost and ended up going through the pass instead of coming back to the bluff. Jack would have been able to come right back where he traveled.”

There’s a rustling in the bushes, and someone steps out into the open. Someone in a green shirt, with a gun.

“That’s him,” Riley whispers. “The fake ranger.” 

Bozer just nods, swallowing tightly. He saw the faint ring of stain on the shoulder of the uniform. The man must have pinned his badge over the bullet hole, and tried to wash the blood out of the jacket, but bloodstains dry fast on the edges, making it harder to remove without special cleaners, and leaving that telltale ring.  _ When you try to be really, really accurate in your short films, you learn a lot of weird stuff.  _

“Should we douse the fire and run?” He asks.

“No. He doesn’t know who we are, and he definitely doesn’t know we know the truth. So we’ve got surprise on our side. Let’s take him out.”

Bozer flinches at the coldness in her voice. “You want to ambush him?”

“Sort of.” Riley says. “I could take him from here with these rocks, but I want him alive.” Bozer glances around, there’s a decent heap of stones here along the top of the cliff, probably what stayed put when water washed topsoil over the edge.

_ The rocks. Mac said the striped ones will explode in a fire.  _

“I’ve got an idea,” He whispers, reaching for a rock about the size of his head, with clearly defined brown and grey striping. 

It’s just rained, so Bozer’s fairly sure this rock will be holding some water. He grabs up a handful of sticks and leaves to wrap around it, so the fire will heat it faster. He shifts the leaves just enough to show Riley the rock, and she nods. He can see her hand going to her knife carefully. 

“When should I put it in?” He asks. 

“Now, it’ll take some time to get hot,” Riley whispers back. Bozer shoves the bundle of leaves and rock into the center of the fire just as the fake ranger climbs to the top of the path. 

“You lost, kids?” The man asks. 

“Sort of,” Riley deadpans, shrugging and somehow managing to totally drop the competent secret agent aura she had only seconds ago. “My boyfriend and I got turned around out here, last time I agree to go camping with him.” Bozer gives her a hurt glare. “Can you tell us how to get back to the trailhead?”

“Where’d you come from?” The man asks.  _ Right, there’s a dead body seventy feet almost directly below us. If we’d come up the bluff there’s no way we would have missed it. _

“Trailhead to the northwest,” Bozer answers.  _ They don’t know this woods either. He won’t be able to tell I made that up. _

“Well, you ought to head back that way,” The man says. “These cliffs aren’t for amateurs.” 

“Yeah, we weren’t about to climb down and break our necks,” Riley says. 

And then there’s a hissing pop. Bozer and Riley both hit the dirt, covering their heads, and a shower of coals and rock shards explodes above them. The fake ranger shouts, stumbling backward and clawing at his face. Riley leaps back on her feet in an instant, knocking the man to the ground and kicking the gun out of his hand, then pointing it at his face, where Bozer can see several burns and cuts from the explosion. 

Riley looks absolutely deadly, holding that gun. “Tell me where your friends are going, and where they took my brother.” Bozer never thought he’d be scared of Riley. But right now, he is. Just a little. Because every line of her face, every movement, is pure Jack, at his most Delta moments. She’s ready to kill. And Bozer can see very clearly that if she has to, she will. 

“They went north. A valley up there. Gio’s looking for his money.”

“Is our friend still alive?” Riley asks.

“Was when I left.”

Riley gives the man an approving nod. “You better hope he is when I find him. Or I will come back here and personally make sure you join your friend at the bottom of that cliff.” 

* * *

VALLEY SOMEWHERE

X MARKS THE SPOT

“We’re here,” Gio announces suddenly, jerking Mac to a halt. “Spread out. Find it!” 

“If we’re here, can I…” Mac begins.

“No. Don’t even think about it.” Gio yanks Mac’s hair, hard, and Mac flinches. “Sit down. And wait.”

It isn’t long before Emma and the other man return. Both of them look tired and angry. 

“Gio, there's nothing here!” The man says.

“You led us to the wrong place,” Emma accuses, her hands clenched tight around her rifle stock.

“I didn’t. That’s what’s on the map,” Gio says. “Unless this here kid tricked us taking us over those rocks. He might be playing some kinda game.” Mac feels a fist in his stomach, driving the air out of his lungs. And when he bends over, trying to catch his breath, there’s the cold metal of a gun pressed to his temple. 

“I didn't, and I'm not,” Mac replies desperately, choking out the words as he tries to suck in a breath. 

“I don't believe you.” Mac hears the gun cock.

“Wait. Wait,” He whispers desperately, He’s got a very good view of the ground, and something he can see is giving him an idea. “Is what you're looking for nailed to the ground?”

“What kind of question is that?” Gio snaps. 

“'Cause if it wasn't, it's possible that a flash flood took it away.”

The gun moves slightly. “Explain.”

Mac musters up enough energy to point in the general direction of what gave him the idea. “See the dried mud on the rocks right there. It's a waterline, and it's a recent one. If you tell me the size and the weight of what you're looking for, I may be able to determine where the flood took it.”

“I'm looking for $18 million.”

Mac raises an eyebrow.  _ Well, that’s interesting. And weird. Buried treasure for real I guess.  _ “All right. How'd it get out here?” 

“I pushed it out a plane.” Gio’s voice is laced with anger and frustration. 

“All right. All right, well, what was the denomination of bills?”

“How does that possibly matter?” The second man asks. 

Mac frowns at him. “Do you want to find it or not?” 

“The cash was in hundreds,” Gio replies. 

Mac frowns, mental math has been a little more difficult lately, and dehydration and fatigue are making that worse, so he scratches his calculation on the dirt with the toe of his boot to check himself. “So that means it was about 400 pounds. What was it in?”

“Wooden crate. The kind banks use to ship money to each other when they're balancing the ledgers.”

Mac nods slowly. “Okay, so you guys stole this crate, you loaded it onto a plane, and then you pushed it out mid-flight. I'm guessing that the cops were onto you?”

“Something like that. It was too hot to land with the cash, so we pushed it out and marked the location on the map, and the rest you know,” Gio snaps. “Now, where is my money? Getting pretty sick of asking you.”

Mac raises his hands in surrender, trying to calm the situation before he gets a bullet in him. “Okay, look, I can-I can use the erosion rate of the soil to determine the speed of the flash flood's water. Then I can solve for direction and distance traveled by the crate, as long as I can figure out the missing variable here.”

“And that is?” Emma asks.

“It's the, uh, angle of the slope of the ground we're standing on right now.”

“This ground's completely flat,” The second man argues. 

“To the naked eye it is. Can I borrow your scope?” Mac asks, pointing to Emma’s rifle. She glares at him.

“Give it to him,” Gio snaps. “You want to find the money or not?”

Mac starts setting up a makeshift transept. It’s not going to be perfect, but hopefully it’s enough to get the job done. Now he just needs a reference point.

He hands Emma a thick stick, cut to the exact length he needs. “Take it just beyond that rock.”

She stabs it into the ground, then looks back at him, frowning. “Is this really gonna work?”

“Yes.” Mac looks up from his contraption. “The greatest angle of the slope is 18 degrees northeast. And we are looking at a crate, let's say 430 pounds, made of porous wood, filled with cash. So if I can calculate the flood time and water speed using the erosion rate, then that means the crate would've floated about...right there.” He taps his finger on the map.

“You better be right.” 

_ I know. _

* * *

GENERIC NEBRASKA NEIGHBORHOOD

NOW HOME TO THE “RALSTON” FAMILY

Leanna steps out of the back of the house, her gun in her hand but her face calm, and gives Matty a small nod. “All clear. Welcome home.” She pushes open the door to let Ethan, Deena, and Mara in, then steps out to grab some more of the luggage from the car. 

Matty walks in, and for lack of something to keep her occupied, begins taking dust covers off furniture. Deena is in the kitchen, digging through a box and looking increasingly distressed. Matty wants to say something to her, but nothing is coming to mind. 

She jumps when the door slams shut behind Leanna, who drops two suitcases to the floor. “This is, uh this is all the stuff they brought. And Ethan is doing another sweep of the neighborhood just to just to be safe.” Matty nods, sitting down on an ottoman she’s just uncovered. Leanna takes a chair beside her.

“How are you holding up?” She asks. 

Matty glances toward the kitchen, where Deena has pulled out some cleaner and is busily scrubbing the stove. “It's her I'm worried about. I want to talk to her, put her mind at ease, but I have no idea what to say.”

Leanna smiles sadly. “Matty, you have the best way with words of anyone I have ever met. You’ll be able to say the right thing.”

“I’m not sure I said the right things to you this morning, Leanna.” 

“You did.” Leanna says. “I’ve been quiet all drive because I’ve been thinking. Not because I’m mad at you.” She looks down at her folded hands. “And I think you’re right. About what risks we’re taking. About seeing the big picture.”

Matty smiles sadly. “But I’ve also made the mistake of letting the big picture control my life and make decisions. Ethan taking that assignment was big picture. If I had asked him not to, he would have said no to it. But I let him go because I thought I could see the future.” She takes Leanna’s hand. “I was wrong to think you’re just like me. To try and map out your future because I was unhappy with my own.”

“You’re just being a mom,” Leanna says softly. “Moms just want the best for their kids.”

And suddenly, Matty knows how she has to get through to Deena. And as luck would have it, that’s the instant Mara decides to speak up, from the table where she’s already started scribbling in a coloring book. 

“Mommy, I need purple.”

Deena drops her scouring pad and steps over to the table, sorting through a pitifully small bag of crayons that look like the ones that came from the last restaurant they stopped at. 

“It's not here, sweetie.” Deena stands up, pushing some hair off her face, looking like she’s aged ten years in just this one day. 

“But I need it now!” Matty hears all the emotions in that frustrated voice.  _ She’s just a child. And all the adults around her are tense, lashing out, reacting. No wonder she’s doing the same. _

She steps up, hoping to help defuse the situation. “You know what, Mara? You can make your own purple. Look.” She picks up the red crayon from the table. “All you need is red and blue.” She colors a small patch with red, then picks up the blue crayon and covers that. “See? Purple. You want to try?”

Mara takes the crayons and starts coloring. Matty looks up, and Deena gives her a faint, tired smile. “Thank you.”

Matty sighs. “Giving up everything you've ever known. Having to start over again twice. I can't imagine how hard this has been for you.” Deena nods, still looking skeptical and none too friendly. “But what I can imagine is that you would like to start your new life without any questions, which is why I think you should know the truth. Ethan and I were married, and we loved each other very much, but that was a lifetime ago, before you and he ever met.” Matty glances back at the girl coloring at the table. “Now you and Mara are his life. And as soon as we're sure that you're safe here, you'll never see me again.”

Deena nods slowly. “All I want is to give Mara a good life.”

“And you will.” Matty releases a breath, and with it the last of her connection to Ethan.  _ I guess we wanted different things after all. _ And now she can look at Mara and not grieve what could have been. She can be happy that this girl is loved.

Mara slides down from the table, walks up, and hands Matty her colorful drawing. “For you.”

“This is for me?” Matty takes the picture gently, smiling, giving a theatrical gasp of approval and awe that makes Mara giggle. “It's beautiful. Thank you.”

“You're welcome,” Mara whispers shyly, and Matty pulls her into a hug.  _ Some things were never meant to be, for me. But that doesn’t mean I have to be bitter. I can still love what is.  _

* * *

Mac pushes his way through a stand of scrubby pines and out into a clearing, wincing at the scrape of branches over his bruised cheek. 

“This ravine acts as a natural drainage basin for anything displaced by the flood. So your crate should be here.”

“It better be. Or your body’s going to be instead.” Gio threatens, but his anger is cut off by shouts from the other two team members. 

“There. There!” Emma points to a crate lying in the wash of a sandy gully. 

“Get it open,” Gio orders, and the two go to work, prying wooden slats loose and opening the top. “It's all here!” The man laughs. 

“Yeah, well, we can celebrate when we get the money back to the car,” Gio growls.

“It'll be tough. We only have three backpacks, and we're a man down,” The man replies. “And where’s Anton? Thought he was supposed to deal with our nosy tail.”

Gio frowns, pulling out his radio. “Anton? Hey, you good back there?”

“Fine. Took care of the guys following us and on my way,” a voice says. Mac’s eyes widen. That’s Bozer, doing one of his impersonations.  _ He’s good, but he’s got little tells to his voice.  _ “I’ll be there soon.”

“On the bright side, 18 million split four ways is much better,” Emma says. “But I still think we’re going to have a hard time packing it out of here.”

Mac shifts nervously. “Okay. I did what I promised. I got you to your money. Why did you hurt my friends?”

Gio scowls. “Because they decided to make a nuisance of themselves, that’s why.” He glances at Mac. “Are you smarter than them, boy? If I said you’re gonna eat a bullet if you don’t think of a way to get all this money back by yourself, what would you say?” 

“I'd say that wasn't part of the deal.”

“Yeah, well, I'm making it the deal. Answer me.”  _ I already know I’ll say yes. I have to stay alive, because that was Bozer on the radio and that means that guy didn’t find Jack, so my team is coming. But just giving in might make him suspicious.  _ “Can you build something to make moving my money a one-man job?”

Mac can hear what the man isn’t saying. Those words are more ominous than any threat.  _ He doesn’t want to need any of us. _

“No. There’s too much.” Mac shakes his head. “It’s too heavy to move alone.” He looks from Gio to the crate. “Four hundred pounds is going to be hard to budge with the manpower you have. And even then, with your crew hungry and thirsty and hypothermic...it’s going to take all we’ve got just to get this a few miles, let alone to wherever it is you’re planning on taking it.” 

Gio turns around and shoots both the others before Mac has time to flinch. “Well, you’d better hope you can figure it out. Because now you have to.” 

* * *

“Riley.” Bozer tugs at her sleeve. “Riley, I heard something.”

Riley stops in her tracks.  _ We’re both on edge after that ranger guy.  _ She’s got him tied up with his own gear at the cliffside, but there’s no telling who else might be roaming around out here waiting to pick them off.

She glances down at her leg, where Bozer’s left sleeve is tied tightly around a gash a shard of the exploding rock left behind. It’s not bad, just stinging and oozing a little blood, but she’s well aware that she’s not at a hundred percent right now and another attack is something she should be prepared for. She fingers the gun in her waistband, ready to pull it out at a moment’s notice. 

“Riley? Boze?” A very familiar voice calls, and a second later something thuds into the leaves off the trail. Or more accurately, someone. Jack wipes bark-coated hands on his pants, sighing. “The hell are you doing here?”

“Ranger’s dead,” Riley replies. “One of our bad guys shot him and took his uniform. We...sort of ran into said replacement, he’s tied up a mile or so back.”

“Damn, they musta sent him back after me,” Jack says. “You see the dead guy at Fraser’s Bluff?”

“Yeah,” Bozer says, grimacing.

“I took the radio off him and tried calling for help on an emergency channel, but…”

“They had the ranger’s radio so you got them,” Riley finishes. “And when he came back to where he knew you’d have had to find that radio, he found us instead.”

“So we’re on our own again, I guess,” Jack says. 

“Yeah, but on the bright side, I got that guy’s gun,” Riley says, handing it to Jack. “It’s still got eight rounds.” 

“You hear two more a few minutes ago?” Jack asks. “Well, maybe more like half an hour now, I guess.”

“No, but that’s probably around the time Bozer blew up a rock so we could catch this guy off guard,” Riley replies. 

“You blew up a rock? Nice work, dude,” Jack says, clapping Bozer on the shoulder. He flinches. 

“Easy, Jack, I just climbed up a mountain.”

“Yeah, you both look a little the worse for wear,” Jack says. “Ri, what happened?”

“Nothing much, it’s just a scratch. Honestly.” She shrugs. “I’m good to keep going.”

Jack nods. 

“Hey look,” Bozer says. “Smoke, guys.”

“That’s got to be them,” Jack replies. “Let’s move.” Riley nods, and follows him along the trail of footprints left in the dirt. 

It’s easier going now, they’re coming downhill on the other side of the ridge they’ve managed to cross, toward a ravine gully that is more often than not a river. Riley knows where they are, they’re in the heart of the wilderness now, almost at the center of the area.  _ Jack and I only hiked this far in once. _ Most of the time they circle the perimeter more. 

The smoke gets less visible for a while, the fire must be hotter, but then it goes black and thick again. And there’s an echoing crack that all of them are all too familiar with. 

The single gunshot, and the agonized scream that follows it, shatters Riley’s whole world. She knows exactly who that was crying out in pain. “MAC!” 

* * *

Mac fumbles with the logs for the sled he’s building. Or at least pretending to build. He’s got to make this convincing. 

He forces himself not to look at the bodies Gio has dragged off to the side in the weeds. He doesn’t want to join them. Emma wasn’t dead, when Gio went to drag her away, Mac could hear her groaning. Gio just put a bullet in her head and tossed her in the weeds. 

Mac swallows hard.  _ I tried to warn her what he’d do. I tried. But she wouldn’t listen. _ Still, that doesn’t make him feel any better about this whole thing. A lot of people are dead, and he might be next, if this plan doesn’t work.

“Hey, how close are you to done?” Gio asks, warming his hands next to the fire Mac’s been keeping alive, claiming he needs it for part of his build. He does, actually, but he doesn’t want to tell Gio why.  _ And it’ll help my team home in on me too. I hope.  _

“I’m close,” He says. “How’s that rope coming?”  _ And right there is poetic justice. He’s creating the thing I’m going to use to beat him. _ Mac barely pushes the small, victorious smile off his face when Gio holds it up. 

“Done.”

“Okay, great. Then there’s just one more thing.” 

Mac places one end of the rope carefully in the middle of the piles of money, where he’s also managed to shove handfuls of tinder when Gio wasn’t looking, distracted by making the rope. Then he tosses the other end into the fire. 

“What are you...my money!” Gio shouts as the whole crate bursts into bright flames. He rushes toward it, but Mac tackles him, slamming him to the ground, trying to wrench the gun away from him. Gio pushes him aside, but Mac just rolls and gets up and grabs for him again. He has to win. He has to. There’s no going back now.

He struggles and claws and even bites, and Gio yells, but then there’s a white-hot pain in his left leg, so bad it makes the world narrow and blink out for a moment. Mac thinks he might be screaming, he doesn’t know. It hurts so bad.

He scrabbles along the ground, pulling himself away from Gio and toward the fire. He has one last trick left. 

Gio towers over him, aiming the gun at his head. And then Mac reaches into the coals, grabs a a handful, and tosses them in Gio’s face. 

The man yells, and the shot goes wild as he stumbles backward. Mac snatches one of the rocks he used to ring the fire, pushes himself to his feet despite the screaming pain in his leg, and smashes the rock into the side of Gio’s head, before crumpling to the ground, letting the black wave of agony drag him under. 

* * *

Jack’s never run this fast in his life. Ever. 

The second gunshot chills him to his core, because he can’t hear anything after that.  _ Don’t be dead, please, Mac, you can’t be dead. _

He plunges out of a stand of pines at a dead run, freezing when he sees a brown coat in the weeds.  _ No, no, no, no... _ Then he sees long black hair on the head peeking out.  _ Not Mac. _

There’s a fire burning in the middle of a clearing, and there, beside it, are two still bodies. One of them is wearing the plaid shirt Mac had. That’s Mac. And he’s not moving.

“Mac!” Jack skids across the ground to land beside him, flinching at the pool of red around him.  _ Where is that…. _ He can see one bullet wound in Mac’s leg already, but there was a second shot...

Jack lifts Mac’s hand, it’s ice cold, but he can feel a pulse in the wrist. He breathes a small sigh of relief. Mac’s alive, he’s just...in bad shape. The bullet wound in his leg is oozing blood that coats the leg of his pants and drips onto the ground. His coat is gone, and his shirt is clearly damp from the rain. He’s wounded and hypothermic, and if he hasn’t gone into shock already, he will very soon. 

Riley and Bozer race up next to him, and Jack turns to look at them, their wide eyes and scared faces. “He’s alive, but he’s been shot. We have to deal with this fast.” 

“What do we do?” Bozer asks. 

“Bozer, put pressure on it,” Jack says. “Riley, get me some yarrow. Hurry.” Jack begins checking Mac over for more than the obvious injury. He does seem to have taken a hit to the head, but not a bad one, and the bruising on his face is superficial.  _ Was that second gunshot  _ him? Jack shudders to think of how traumatized the kid will be if he shot someone, even to save his own life. 

Mac groans, blinking awake, and Bozer flinches. “Too much?”

“No, no, not enough,” Mac grinds out between clenched teeth. Bozer pushes down harder, and Mac  _ screams, _ a raw, wrecked-voice cry, scrabbling at the ground with his fingers and his good leg. 

“I’m sorry, Mac, I’m sorry,” Bozer says, and Jack can see tears in his eyes.

“You’re doin’ good.” Jack puts a hand on Bozer’s shoulder, satisfied Mac isn’t hiding any more serious wounds, like a punctured lung or broken skull. “Here, I’ll take over.” Bozer pulls back as Jack puts on pressure, staring at the blood on his hands in an almost mesmerized way.

“Hey, he’s gonna be okay,” Jack hastens to reassure Bozer. “Trust me, he’s gonna be alright.”

“I got yarrow!” Riley says, running up and skidding to a stop.

“Okay, pound it to a paste and then we’re going to pack it in the wound,” Jack says. Riley nods, Jack can see her hands shaking as she pounds the plant to a pulp and begins rolling it between her fingers. 

“I’m sorry, Mac,” she whispers, tearing away his pant leg around the wound to get a better look at it. 

“‘S ok,” Mac whispers, shaking violently under Jack’s hands. 

Riley begins packing the wound, and Mac gasps out a choked series of soundless sobs of pain. Jack grabs his hand, then winces when that causes Mac to sob too. He looks at the palm, there are several red-blistered areas that are clearly burns.  _ God, kid, what did you do? _

Riley finishes packing the wound, and Bozer tears off the remaining sleeve of his coat to wrap around it. “Now what?” He asks.

“We need to tie it to keep pressure on it.”

Bozer pulls the knot tight, but Jack can already tell that’s not going to be good enough, and clearly so can Mac. “Tighter, you have to do it tighter,” He gasps.

“Riley, find some vine,” Jack says.

“I think this will be even better.” Riley’s holding the drawstring from a tent bag. She winds it around Mac’s leg and pulls it tight, and Mac arches off the ground, screaming. Jack can feel tears burning his own eyes.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Riley whispers.

“That’s good,” Jack says gently. “Tie it off.” Riley does it, and Jack glances at Mac. “Hey, kiddo, you’re doing great. Hang in there, we’re gonna get you to a hospital, okay?” Mac nods, but doesn’t open his eyes. Jack can see tears leaking down the kid’s temples, dripping to the ground. 

“Looks like he was building some kind of sled,” Riley says. “If we can finish it, that might be the gentlest way to transport him.”

Jack nods. As much as he wants to cradle Mac to his chest, carrying him like a child, that’ll jar his leg worse. Jack glances around. “I’m gonna pick over the bodies for anything we can use. Riley, Bozer, get to work on that sled.”

The first thing Jack looks for, on all three of the bodies, is phones or radios. None of them have working cell phones, and all of the radios are the same kind as the one Jack found on the body under the cliff. He figures the fake ranger Riley and Bozer took out had the good one; but that guy’s tied up on the other side of the bluffs, and going back will take time they don’t have, not when Mac has such a bad wound. 

The man and woman by the side of the trail have both been shot. But the body close to the crate of money, by the fire, has a blunt blow to the temple. Jack sees a bloodsmeared rock nearby, as well as a handful of ash and charred wood, and the picture paints itself in his head. Mac, probably already wounded, reaching into the fire in a desperate attempt to find something to slow this man down, grabbing a handful of coals. Picking up that rock when the guy was distracted, and taking him out with it.  _ He did what he had to do, but it’s probably gonna give the poor kid a dozen more nightmares to add to the repertoire.  _ Mac hates killing, even in self-defense. He probably didn’t even intend to do it.  _ At least he didn’t have to shoot him. _

Jack looks down at the man’s body. He checks for a pulse, and breathing, and finds none. But just for good measure, he rolls the body over and puts a bullet through the guy’s heart.  _ You shot my kid, you bastard. You deserve it. _

He grabs Mac’s coat off the man sprawled by the side of the path, even though it has a bullet hole in the back, and takes all the packs. There’s little in them worth anything to Jack and the others, but Jack unrolls one of the sleeping bags and unzips it, then carries it over to where Riley and Bozer are working on the sled. “Here, we’ll put this down to cushion him,” Jack says, arranging the second, still rolled up bag as a pillow. The third he unzips almost all the way and lays over the other two. “He’s going into shock, we need to keep him as warm as possible.” 

Riley nods. “We’re almost done here.” Jack flinches at the sight of smears of Mac’s blood on her cheek and forehead where she pushed tangled hair back with a stained hand. 

“Okay, then I’ll get him tucked in. Mac, you ready to go?”

Mac manages a weak nod. Jack lifts him, letting Mac bury his face in Jack’s coat to muffle the cries of agony. He carefully tucks Mac into the open sleeping bag, then stuffs in handfuls of leaves and grass as extra insulation before zipping the bag shut. 

“Okay, team, let’s get moving.” _ _

* * *

Matty steps out onto the front lawn of Ethan and his family’s new house, then turns around to face Ethan in the doorway. His face is strained and apologetic. “Thanks, Matty. For saving my family in Cypress, for moving us here, for for everything. Sorry you had to relive this.”

Matty takes a deep breath. “The truth is I chose to do this myself because I thought watching you move into your new home with your new family would crush me. And the pain would bring me the closure I need.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah.” She nods.

“So, did it?” 

“Not how I expected. Because now that I'm here, I'm not feeling any pain, just a strong desire for you and your family to be happy. For you to be happy with them.” 

_ And it’s thanks to Leanna. She reminded me that even though I could never have a child, not like this, I have a family, I have children. And they are my everything.  _ So she’ll let Ethan have his family too.

“Well, that means the world to me. I don't think I could have done any of this if I hadn't heard you say that.”

“You know, after this, there can be no more contact with your former life,” Matty says, trying to turn this back to business.

“Including you.”

“Especially me. This is goodbye, Ethan. Tell Mara I’m sorry I won’t be coming back.”

“Bye, Matty.” He says. “I will.” 

“And, for the record, Ethan, it’s not your fault your family’s safety was compromised.” Matty looks up at him. “That’s all I can tell you, I hope it’s good enough. It wasn’t anything you did.”

She can see the relief flood his face. “Thank you, Matty.” 

* * *

SOMEWHERE IN THE WOODS

Jack glances at Riley. “You good or you need to rest?” He can see her limping, but he can also tell how determined she is to do her part to get Mac home fast. 

“Um...I guess I could take a break.” It’s got to be bad if she’s actually admitting she needs to stop for a few minutes. But he amends that thought the second he and Bozer put down the sled and he walks around to look at Mac.

Riley wasn’t asking to stop for herself, she was asking to stop because Mac is getting worse. Jack bends down to sit beside the sled, reaching for Mac’s hand. Mac is shivering, teeth chattering. Probably in shock, from the blood loss and pain. The bullet is still in his leg, and if Jack had to guess it’s lodged in, and probably broke, Mac’s femur.  _ That’s gonna hurt like hell. _

“How’s Riley?” Mac whispers.  _ Of course that’s the first thing he thinks of. _

“Better than you,” Riley replies, shaking her head but speaking gently. “I’m going to be fine, Mac. I’ve gotten worse injuries from the ranch cats.” She chuckles. “I’ve got a scar on my arm from a grey tabby who got spooked when I picked her up, but I tell everyone it’s from a knife fight on an op cause it looks gnarly.”

Jack knows that scar. He remembers helping Riley wash the blood off her arm in the kitchen sink and wrapping it up with things from the first aid kit in the kitchen cupboard.  _ One of the first times I got that feeling she was actually my kid. _

Riley leans over the sled, wrapping Mac’s unburnt hand in her own. “We’re all going to be fine, Mac. I promise.” Jack can hear the desperation in her voice. She’s trying to convince herself. Almost as much as Jack is. 

_ If we get him out of the woods in less than a day from the time he got shot, an infection shouldn’t be too bad.  _ Jack knows how long it takes for things to get serious, from plenty of unfortunate experiences. And he knows that since the bullet is still in Mac's leg, so is a piece of that filthy pant leg it traveled through.  _ God only knows what kind of dirt and debris was on there, and is now inside that wound. _ And puncture type wounds have the most potential for becoming infected anyway. 

The thoughts of how bad this could get if they don’t get Mac to civilization soon spur Jack to his feet. “Come on, if you’re all ready to move, we have to go.”

Riley nods, standing up with a slight grimace. “Yeah, I’m good. Want me to take a turn on that sled, Boze? You look like you could use a break.”

_ She knows better than to ask me. _ Jack would drag Mac out of here single handedly if that’s what it took. He can’t not do everything in his power to get his kid to safety. 

They continue trudging along. Jack sings Willie Nelson at the top of his lungs, scaring off the birds in the trees. Bozer plays “I Spy” with Mac, trying to keep his mind off the pain that leaves him whimpering and gasping whenever the sled is jarred even a little. 

Riley finally tires, favoring her bad leg, and Bozer takes over from her again. Jack’s shoulders are sore, and his back is killing him. He needs to let one of them help, but he can’t. _ I brought us out here, this is my fault. Mac is hurt and it’s because of me. _

“I think we need to stop for the night,” Bozer says. “I can barely see, and if one of us trips over a rock or something and breaks  _ our _ leg, we’ll only make this whole situation worse.”

Jack nods. As much as he didn’t want Mac to have to spend a night out here in the woods in pain, he knows Bozer’s right. If another person gets hurt they’re in real trouble. 

“Okay. We’ll stop here.” 

* * *

Mac watches the flickering glow of the fire illuminate the faces of his team clustered around it. All of them look exhausted, faces drawn and lined with worry that’s only made more evident by the wavering orange glow. 

Mac knows what they’re all not saying. It took two days of hiking to get to the spot where Mac got shot. And that was with everyone healthy and on their feet. Jack and Bozer and Riley, even taking turns hauling the sled, are going much more slowly now, and getting exhausted faster. It’s going to take probably twice as long to get out of the woods. And he’ll definitely have an infection by then. 

He shivers. Even with the fire blazing and huddled in an extra sleeping bag from the...from the thieves, he’s chilled and miserable. He can’t tell if it’s just the night air or the beginnings of a fever. 

“Soup’s done,” Jack says with an attempt at cheerfulness, lifting the can he found in a stream (apparently littering is going to help them, this time) off the fire with his gloves. “Jack’s acorn special. And there’s pine needle tea brewing too.” 

“A regular five star spread,” Riley says with a grin, laying out some of the cattails on a stone. “And I found some hickory nuts too.” 

“Awesome,” Bozer says. “I guess it’s true that appetite is the best sauce, because these taste a lot better than yesterday.”

Jack brings a small, makeshift bark dish to Mac’s lips, holding some of the acorn soup. “You hungry?” Mac just nods. He’s starving. 

Mac chokes on the bitter liquid as Jack tips a small amount into his mouth. It tastes horrible, but he knows he needs some kind of nutrition in him. 

“I know, kiddo,” Jack says gently. “Little sips, alright?” 

Mac nods, drinking a bit more before letting his head fall back to the rolled up sleeping bag cushioning his head. He’s just so tired. 

“Okay, we can quit for now,” Jack says, taking away the can and returning to sit down next to the sled. “How do you feel?”

“And it’s for posterity, so be honest, right?” Mac manages a weak laugh.

“Yes. Finally, you’re catching on.” Jack smiles.

“Well, I’m cold, my leg hurts, and I’m hungry.” He shakes his head quickly as Jack picks up the soup can again. “Not for acorn broth.” 

“Okay, then how bout pine needle tea? Trust me, not as gross as it sounds,” Jack says. “I think it’s done.”

“Guess I’ll try it,” Mac says, shrugging and grimacing when even that motion shoots pain through his leg. 

Jack helps him lift his head to drink, and as promised, the warm liquid is a lot less gross than the last stuff. Mac thinks he might never get the smell of pine needles out of his nose again, but he can at least get the weak tea down his throat. It’s better than nothing in his stomach. 

Jack arranges the sleeping bag over him a little better. “Try and get some rest, bud. Okay?”

Mac nods, huddling down in the sleeping bag as much as he can for warmth. He is exhausted, and his eyes close slowly. 

_ “Jack!” Mac screams. “NO!” But the body at the bottom of the cliff doesn’t move.  _ I killed him. I killed him. _ Mac looks down at the gun in his hand, the revolver from the box in the bunker. He’s still in the forest but Jack is dead in front of him, and it doesn’t make sense, nothing makes sense. Nothing makes sense because Jack is DEAD. _ This can’t be happening. It can’t be.

_ But the memory of Jack's betrayed eyes is all too real. The cry of confusion and shock that was cut off as he tumbled over the ledge. Mac drops the gun to his feet, his chest constricting in hitching sobs. He just killed Jack, he doesn’t even know why. _ What have I done, what have I done?

_ There’s a sound from behind him, and he whirls, gasping at the sight of the figure in the black coat standing there. He wishes he was still holding the gun. “Murdoc?” _

_ Murdoc’s slow applause is horrifying. “Well, well, well. I always knew you had it in you, MacGyver. That delicious, wonderful darkness. Finally coming out to play.” _

_ “I didn't mean…” _

_ “Oh, that’s what you said last time. ‘I didn’t mean to kill poor Ramsay, I didn’t think there was anyone in that building’. Pathetic, Angus, all that whining and cringing and pleading. No one believed you then, no one is going to listen now. You might as well come with me. I’m the only one who won’t hate you.” _

_ “I’m not coming with you. I’d rather throw myself off this cliff.” Mac takes a step backward, but there is no edge. He’s standing in the middle of a burning warehouse, crates in flames stacked all around him. Jack’s body is at his feet, and his monster of a father is by his side.  _

_ “You killed him, because he got in our way. You are my son after all, it seems.” James’s smile is sick. “Good work, Angus.” _

_ Mac stares down at Jack’s body, at the red hole in his head below the tac helmet. _

_ “Come on, Angus, we have to go.” James insists. _

_ Mac doesn’t listen. He crashes to his knees, feeling the fire burning hotter, and hotter, and hotter... _

* * *

“No, no. Jack…” Mac’s weak voice draws Jack’s attention. The kid barely stirred when Jack got up to check on him this morning, lost in a feverish haze. It’s too early for an infection, but the level of trauma the kid’s body’s been put through must have caught up. His body is reacting to it all by running a raging fever, trying to fix...everything.

“Mac, I’m here, I’m right here. I’m so sorry I ever let you out of my sight.” 

“Not here, you’re dead,” Mac insists, starting to thrash. “Not here.” 

“Mac, I am. I’m here. I’m alive, and so are you.” Jack reaches for Mac’s hand, gently rubbing his thumb over it, avoiding the cuts and burns. 

“J-jack?” Mac’s eyes flicker open, much too bright, much too tearful.

“Yeah, kiddo, it’s me.”

Mac begins to sob. Wrenching, gasping cries that shake his whole body. “Jack,” he chokes out.

“It’s okay, I’m here, I’m here.” Jack gathers his kid’s sweaty body to him, holding him tightly as the grey dawn comes. “I’m never letting you go again.”

* * *

Riley trudges along, feeling like her shoulders have come untethered from the rest of her body. Jack’s leading them on the easiest terrain to safety, but it’s taking longer as a result. And Mac...Mac has been in and out all morning. Fever, chills, hallucinations...he’s cried, screamed for all of them, pleaded with invisible people to stop hurting him, and begged both Murdoc and his father to go away. It’s shattering Riley’s heart.

A soft sound of pain from the sled only adds to the broken pieces. “Stop.”

“Okay, kiddo.” Jack sets his side of the sled down, and Riley does the same, shaking her arms and rubbing her shoulders. It doesn’t really help. She follows Jack around to where he’s kneeling beside Mac. 

“You have to leave me here and go. I’m slowing you down.”

“That’s the fever talking, kiddo. Just the fever.” Jack smoothes Mac’s hair back from his forehead. “We’re gonna get you out of here and patched up and it’s all gonna be okay.” His voice is the kind of soft soothing that Riley’s heard before. When she’s been hurt so badly they were afraid she wouldn’t make exfil. _ Mac can’t be in that much danger, can he? _

“Am I gonna lose my leg?” Mac asks weakly. “It’s better than my hands I guess.”

“No, no, you’re gonna be fine,” Jack replies. 

“It hurts so much,” Mac whispers. 

“I know, kiddo, I know.” Jack says gently. “I promise we’re gonna get you out of here and get you patched up, okay? And you’re going to be just fine.” 

Mac is too pale, his eyes glassy with fever. Riley chokes back tears, she can’t let Mac see how sad she is. How much seeing him in pain hurts her. She can hear her heartbeat in her ears. It’s been years since she had a panic attack, but she thinks she’s having one right now.

“What is that?” Bozer asks.

_ Okay, maybe not a panic attack after all. _ Suddenly, her overtaxed brain sorts out the sound. Chopper rotors. Rescue. 

They’re still under tree cover, but there’s a clearing up ahead. Riley races through the trees, yanking off her maroon jacket, praying the color will be bright enough to draw the pilot’s attention. She charges out into the middle of the open space, waving the coat and screaming her dry throat raw. Riley jumps up and down, waving her arms. “Hey! We’re down here! Heyyy!”

The chopper circles and lands in a whipping whoosh of dead grass and leaves. Riley can see that it’s a medevac style, and the people leaping out are in rescue team fluorescent gear.

All but one, that is. 

“Freddy?”

Freddy shakes his head. “Figured you were in a little trouble when you didn’t come outta the woods on Sunday.”

“Freddy, you’re a lifesaver,” Riley says. “Mac got shot. Someone else was out here, bunch of bank robbers looking for their money, I guess. He got mixed up with them.” She leads the team back toward where Jack and Bozer are dragging the sled out of the trees. 

“Damn, Freddy, you’re an angel in disguise,” Jack says. 

“Well, when y’all didn’t show up for Sunday dinner as usual, figured something went wrong out here. Cause I have never known Jack Dalton to miss my barbecue chicken a day in his life.” Riley’s stomach growls.  _ It’s past dinner time already? _ “I called the park ranger and couldn’t get an answer, so I figured it was time to call in the big boys.” he gestured to the chopper. 

“The ranger’s dead,” Bozer says. 

“Damn, they got Tony?” Freddy says. “Shit. He was a good guy.” 

“I’m sorry,” Riley says.  _ He had so few friends up here, losing one is a massive tragedy. And he probably can’t stop thinking about all the guys he lost in the war too. _ Riley knows that’s what happens when Jack loses a friend. His mind replays all the losses he’s ever experienced. 

“Well, you guys took down the bastards that killed him, at least.” 

Riley watches the medical team loading Mac onto the chopper. Another starts checking her leg as she climbs in and sits down, but she only has eyes for Mac. Still too pale, still too quiet...but holding Jack’s hand tightly as the helicopter takes off. 


	15. Father+Bride+Betrayal

###  314-Father+Bride+Betrayal

MAC’S HOUSE

IT’S NICE TO BE ABLE TO WALK IN WITHOUT HELP

Mac lets the door slam shut behind him.  _ Okay, so, it wasn’t much of a walk. But I was doing it. _ First time since he took that bullet in the Washington backwoods. He runs a hand through his sweaty hair and reaches down to pat Mickey’s shoulder. The dog, still not nearly tired, skips and jumps around his legs, tongue lolling. 

“Hey, you take the shower first, kiddo,” Jack says, pulling up the collar of his own t-shirt to wipe his face. “Gotta keep those muscles from stiffening up.” 

Mac rolls his eyes, but he’s not going to refuse. The warm water will feel good on his leg, he can feel the muscles jumping and trembling a little already. He needs to keep them warm and relaxed, or he’s going to be in a good bit of pain.  _ Learned that the hard way. _

He makes sure to check the long surgical scar on his thigh for any signs of an issue, but it doesn’t look redder than normal, and there’s no extra tenderness or swelling.  _ I’ve had a lot of experience watching for signs of trouble healing, but it’s a whole lot more unnerving with screws put in your body. _ The bullet that cracked his femur meant when he fell, the bone broke even further, and it had to be stabilized with surgery and screws. Jack told him, quite seriously, not to cut his leg open to get those out, no matter how badly he needs a piece of metal. 

Mac chuckles at the memory.  _ Thanks, Jack. _ He doesn’t plan on doing anything like that any time soon. He’s had enough pain in that leg to last a lifetime. 

The past few weeks have blurred together in an unending round of PT, improvement logs, and aches. The one bright spot was their court hearing for Mac’s official adoption. He’s now legally and in all the other ways that matter Jack’s son.  _ It doesn’t feel as momentous as I thought it might be. But I guess that’s because he’s been my dad for so long already, a piece of paper is just a formality. _ Still, celebrating afterward with the team was easily one of the best nights of his life, even if he paid for the extra time on his feet with a lot of aches the next day. 

When he comes out of the bathroom, tying his still-damp hair back into a short ponytail again (he seriously considered chopping it off after that guy in the woods kept grabbing it, but he also doesn’t feel all that ready to leave his neck scars so visible) Jack is sitting on the couch, with a thousand-yard stare and his left hand clenched in the fur around Mickey’s neck. 

“Jack?” Mac asks. “What’s wrong? You look like someone died.”

“More like someone came back from the dead,” Jack says dully. “So...an old army buddy of mine called. And…” Jack sighs, running his hands over Mickey’s ears. “I didn’t do my job right the first time, I guess, cause Tiberius Kovacs is alive and well. Spotted in Belgrade last week.”

“Kovacs?” Mac asks. “Who is that?”

“He was...or is, one of the most dangerous freelance terrorists in the world.” Jack looks up at Mac. “They want me to go after him. They’re putting together a task force.”

Mac stumbles, his leg no longer supporting him, and collapses into a chair.  _ No, no, he can’t go. He can’t leave us. He can’t. _

* * *

JACK’S WORLD JUST GOT TURNED UPSIDE DOWN

Jack glances at the all too pale kid in the chair across from him.  _ I know it’s not his leg hurting that’s making him look like that. _ Mac is starting to shake, fingers twitching, tapping against his leg in a rapid staccato.

“You’re not serious,” He finally whispers. “They want you to go after him?” 

Jack sighs. “Mac, I don’t know what I’m gonna do, okay? Like, I want to say no. Right now. But...Kovacs is my Murdoc, in a way. Guy threatened everything and everyone I care about. That’s why I put a bullet in him the first time. Or thought I did.” He swallows. “If he’s back, you, Riley, Bozer, everyone I care about, is in danger. And now I gotta decide if the best way to protect you is to watch your backs or get as far away from you as possible, right the hell now.”

“I want you to stay,” Mac says quickly. 

_ I’m glad he’s more open about his emotions now. Maybe the only good thing to come out of that whole ordeal. _ Mac doesn’t hedge and beat around the bush and wait for everyone else to decide what’s best. He knows what he wants, and he’s finally learned to stand up for it. 

Mac swallows hard and stares at the floor, then looks up at Jack. “What if he comes for us and you aren’t here?” _ _

_ Of course he still frames it with logic. But I know that what he just blurted out was the truth. _

“I want to stay too, bud, believe me. I don’t know how much Kovacs knows about my life now. I don’t know who he knows about. So I have to assume he already knows about you and Riley and Phoenix.”

“Which means you have to stay and protect us, right?” Mac asks. 

“I don’t know, kiddo. I don’t know.” 

Mac makes a small sound of distress. Jack sighs. “Look, kiddo, I’m gonna do whatever is best for you. If that means staying, I’ll stay. But I can’t live with myself if I pull you into that man’s line of fire along with me, and you end up being the one taking the bullet.”

“But what if he kills  _ you? _ ” Mac asks. “And I could have stopped him?”

“Mac, we could circle around this all day. Neither of us wants to lose the other one, I know. And we’re gonna have to make the best decision that protects us both.” Jack puts his arm around Mac’s shoulder. “I promise, no matter what, that I will not do anything that puts you in harm’s way from that man.”

“I ran off to try and face James alone because I was scared of what he would do to you,” Mac says. “It didn’t end well.”

Jack sighs.  _ Damn it, the kid’s got a point. And he knows it. We all told him not to chase that monster down alone, and he did it anyway because he’s a self-sacrificing idiot. Almost got killed. _

“I know, kiddo. I know.” 

Jack knows he’s the logical choice to go out there and hunt that bastard down, he knows Kovacs better than arguably anyone. But that doesn’t mean this is the  _ right _ choice. He wants to protect the people he’s made into his own little family. He doesn’t want to see them hurt, but he knows that whatever decision he makes has the potential to damage them beyond repair.  _ If I leave, I abandon them all, especially Mac, and how can I do that? But if I stay, and Kovacs comes for me… _

Jack Dalton, the government agent, shouldn’t need to think twice. This is his duty, this is what he’s good at. He made a promise to protect his country, and that means doing whatever is necessary to stop any threat in their tracks. He should be packing his bags right now.

But somewhere in the past few years, that Jack Dalton changed. And Jack Dalton, the father, is at a loss.  _ I’ve always been taught to make the decision that serves the greater good. And I’ve always believed the greater good is what saves the most lives. But right now, it feels like the greatest good is the people around me. _ And he has no idea what the best way is to protect them. 

* * *

SOMEWHERE OFF THE GRID

THIS TIME MATTY’S THE ONE IN THE BLACK HOOD

Matty doesn’t like the feeling of being in the dark, figuratively or literally. At the moment she’s both. The men who picked her up forced her to put on a dark hood, and they have her hands zip-tied. She feels defenseless.  _ It’s a good scare tactic, I’ve used it on all too many informants. But having the tables turned is never exactly a pleasant experience. _

When the car stops, Matty is escorted out, and marched across an open space where leaves crinkle underfoot and a crisp breeze blows. Then up hollow-sounding steps and through a creaky door. 

Once she’s inside and the door slams closed, the hood is pulled off and the restraints cut. Matty blows a couple strings of sweaty hair away from her face and turns to face the man sitting at a table in the room. 

He stands up, extending a hand. “Matilda Webber. I hope that your trip was comfortable.”

“Four hours in an SUV with bad shocks and no air-conditioning. What do you think?” She glowers at one of the men behind her. “And you may want to spring for some deodorant for your boys. The one to my left was a little ripe.”

“Apologies,” The man says, frowning slightly. “I will…”

“Save it. Why am I here?” Matty asks. 

“I need a favor.”

“And why would I do you a favor?” Matty asks. 

“Because of what you'll get in return.”

She raises an eyebrow. “I'm listening.”

“I want you to provide me safe passage into the U.S. so that I may attend my daughter's wedding,” The man says, pacing back and forth and then looking at Matty with sharp, cunning brown eyes. 

Matty shakes her head. “Alonzo, you're the head of a massive criminal operation. You've been on Interpol's most wanted list for the last seven years, the FBI's for five. What could you  _ possibly _ give up that would be worth the risk of letting you back into the States?” 

“Me.” Alonzo says. 

Matty frowns.  _ This is too convenient. Much too convenient.  _

“I see that you're skeptical,” Alonzo says. “I get it. I would be, too, if I was in your shoes. But I'm serious. I'm tired of running. In the last six months alone, I've narrowly escaped an assassin's bullet twice. It's time.”

Matty shakes her head.  _ Clearly he wants this badly, which means I’m going to drive a very hard bargain.  _ “Just you is not enough. For me to agree to do this, I would need intel on the Puebla cartel, Al Barakat, and the NPO. You would need to give up all your clients and your whole organization, and I'll make this happen. But short of that? The answer's no.”

Alonzo nods slowly. “That won't be a problem.”  _ Is he dying?  _ “Do we have a deal?”

Matty shakes her head, there are still a few too many unanswered questions for her liking. “Why me?” 

“That's easy. Out of all the federal agents that I've crossed paths with, I know that you're the only one that would keep her word.”

Matty doesn’t let the flattery move her.  _ I’ve been in the business too long to take it for anything but manipulation. _ “And while that's true, I do need to remind you that I work on behalf of Uncle Sam. He doesn't negotiate with terrorists.”

“But would he negotiate with a father that just wants to walk his only daughter down the aisle?” Alonzo asks.

Finally, Matty nods. “You have a deal.” 

* * *

THE WAR ROOM

IT’S GOOD TO SEE MAC BACK IN IT

“Hey Mac, how’s the leg?” Riley asks.

“Little better every day.” Mac gingerly rubs his thigh as he sits down in one of the chairs. “Now if _Jack_ would just stop fussing, I’d almost feel like I was back to normal.” Riley gives him a sympathetic smile. It used to be her that took the full brunt of Jack’s mother-henning. Still is, when she gets injured; it’s just that Mac tends to have that happen a lot _more._ _Maybe once I would have been jealous. Now I can laugh about it._

“Hey, hey hoss, fussing is a father’s prerogative, okay?” Jack says. 

“You’re  _ really _ enjoying this new adopted kid thing, aren’t you?” Bozer asks. 

Jack nods. But he doesn’t look as cheerful as he should while talking about Mac. Riley thinks this might be the first time she hasn’t seen his eyes light up around Mac since they got the official adoption completed. 

“Jack, what’s going on?” She asks.

“I’ll tell you when Matty gets here,” Jack replies. “Figured I should break it to the whole family together.” Riley feels a cold pit yawning open in her stomach.  _ What’s happening? He can’t be dying. Right? He can’t be. _ But this is how all those tearjerker family movies happen…

“Well, she’s here,” Matty says, walking in and snapping Riley out of the horrible thoughts in her head. “So Jack, what is it you need to say?”

“So, I think it’s only fair to warn you all.” Jack says. “I’ve just accidentally possibly painted a target on all our backs and the Phoenix itself.”

“Dalton, what have you done now?” Matty asks.

“It’s Kovacs, Matty.” Riley watches the woman’s face stiffen. “He’s alive. It’s confirmed.” 

Matty nods slowly. “I’ve heard chatter from my sources as well. The international covert agencies are talking about mobilizing a strike team. I was approached about offering your services as my agency’s representative.” She takes a breath. “I told them I would pass along their offer, and ask you to consider it, and that you would need at least a thirty-six hour window. I haven’t volunteered you or rejected their interest. That’s up to you.” 

“Thanks, Matty. For giving me a little time to think.” Jack’s voice is rough and forced. Riley swallows.  _ Would he do it? Pull up stakes and go back to a life of that? _ She can’t imagine the Phoenix without Jack. It was hard enough making it those months when he was searching for Mac.  _ We need him.  _ She knows it’s a selfish thought, but she felt like they went to pieces without him there to steady them. 

Matty turns to the War Room screen. “In the meantime, Jack, I’d like you to think about that while helping me with this situation.” 

Matty pulls up a picture on the screen, and Jack instantly snaps from his almost confused, pondering expression to pure mission focus. 

“Ohhh. That handsome devil is Alonzo Olvera.”

Matty nods. “That is correct. For those of you who are not familiar with Alonzo, he is the head of the Olvera crime family. Took over the business after his father passed away seventeen years ago and is responsible for transforming it from a midsized criminal operation to a worldwide empire.”

“So he's like an evil Starbucks,” Bozer says. Leanna glances at him, raising an eyebrow. 

“If Starbucks sold illegal arms instead of macchiatos, then, yes,” Riley says.  _ Focus on the mission, like Jack is. Don’t think about him leaving. _

Matty continues. “Phoenix has just been given a rare opportunity to put Alonzo behind bars. Meet Camila Olvera, Alonzo's only child. Twelve years ago, Alonzo escaped the U. S. to avoid arrest and he left Camila behind.”

Riley shakes her head. “So this guy abandoned his little girl just to avoid lockup? That's harsh.”

“Perhaps, but leaving Camila behind did allow her the opportunity to grow up outside of the sphere of Alonzo's influence. As far as our intel indicates, she's had zero involvement with the family business. Pretty sure he did that on purpose.”

“Ah, world's greatest dad,” Mac says bitterly.  _ It sounds a little too much like his own childhood. A criminal father who fled and left him behind. Except I’m pretty sure James didn’t do that out of any intention of letting his son grow up safe. He just thought Mac was a liability.  _

Which is another reason Jack can’t leave.  _ He wouldn’t walk out on Mac, right? He wouldn’t leave him right after he adopted him. I don’t think Mac could take that.  _ He already has a host of abandonment issues. Jack leaving him now would only make it all worse. 

Matty’s voice sharpens, as if she’s noticed Riley’s distraction. “Actually, she might think so. The two have a very close relationship, which brings me to why we're here. Little Camila is all grown up, has fallen in love, and is getting married tomorrow night in Pebble Beach.”

“I'm still not connecting the dots,” Bozer says. “How does Camila getting married help us put Alonzo away?” 

“Because Daddy Dearest wants to attend his daughter's wedding,” Matty replies. “So much so that he's willing to turn himself in, testify against his entire organization, and hand over enough evidence to tear the whole thing down.”

Jack frowns, shifting on his feet and crossing his arms. “And what has you convinced that this conniving lowlife is just gonna allow himself to be taken into custody after twelve years? No, I think old Lonny-boy's trying to pull a fast one to get back in the country and then bail. I say no dice.”

Mac nods slowly. “Jack has a point. I mean, the last thing we want to be responsible for is letting a guy like that loose in the U.S.”  _ He sees James. And he wouldn’t lift a finger to do anything for that man. He’s sure Alonzo doesn’t care about his daughter, that he’s only using this as a chance to get what he wants. Because that’s how James operates. _ Riley isn’t sure she totally believes this either...but then again, Elwood would probably do the same thing. She had lunch with him last week and he was asking her how things were going with Billy.  _ He’s proud of me, and he wants me to be happy. He really has changed, at least that much. _ So...she isn’t sure what to think of Alonzo.

“Okay. Your opinions are all noted,” Matty says. 

“Noted? Does that mean you've already accepted this guy's proposal?” Jack asks. 

“Yes, it does.” She holds up a hand to silence any protest. “Your concerns are all valid. Agreeing to Alonzo's conditions does carry a certain risk.”

“And what if he decides not to hold up his end of the bargain?” Riley asks. 

“Then this all falls on me,” Matty says. “But pulling Alonzo's whole organization out by the roots is one hell of a reward. Which is why I'm willing to roll the dice here.”

“Then, we are with you, Matty,” Leanna says. “What's the plan?” 

“Thank you, Leanna.” Matty turns to the screen. “Alonzo has agreed to turn himself and the hard evidence into our custody the day after the wedding, which, as far as I'm concerned, means he's ours at 12:01 a.m. I'm not taking any chances with this guy. We need to make sure he holds up his end of the bargain.”

Jack nods. “Sounds like we're crashing a wedding.”

* * *

CHAPEL OF THE SACRED HEART

JACK SHOULD HAVE BROUGHT KLEENEX

“What is wrong with you, Jack?” Riley asks, sliding into her seat beside him. “Are you thinking about leaving? After this?” He hears a slight tremor in her voice.  _ I am, but not in the way you’re thinking. _ Jack’s had a car ride to think about this, and he knows where he belongs, where he needs to be, in the face of the danger they’re up against.  _ Mac was right, I’m the best protection this team could have. But if I stay, I have to man up and acknowledge the rest of the family I’ve made too. _ Which is what’s getting him about this wedding.  _ If I tell myself I’m staying for my family, I have to do what’s best for them. All of them. _

“What do you mean?” Jack asks. He blinks rapidly, trying to focus on the mission and not the music, trying not to think about how maybe, maybe, he’s too late to ever get this. Which is not something he wants to talk to Riley about right now.  _ Nope, definitely not, we’re all emotionally compromised enough as it is. _

“You’re tearing up at a random person’s wedding. And you haven't made a joke about ice swans yet. You’re distracted.” 

“It’s Grandma Hairnet’s perfume in front of me, Ri. It’s overpowering, see?” He squints and wrinkles his nose exaggeratedly. “What is that, gardenia?”

“Dalton, you’re not giving away the bride. Pull yourself together,” Matty’s voice is curt. 

Mac reaches over from his other side, holding out his hand. “Squeeze it.”

Jack frowns “What? You’re not gonna lose it too, are you?”

Mac shakes his head. “The pressure should be enough to distract you from the chemical reaction that's going on in your hippocampus that's making you feel like crying. Science.”

Jack sighs and reaches for Mac’s fingers.  _ I want to hold on and never let you go.  _ And from the strength of Mac's grip, he feels the same. 

And then the wedding march plays. “All rise,” the priest at the front says, and the whole crowd stands and turns to see Camila, smiling radiantly, and her father with his arm through hers. 

Matty’s whisper over comms is strangely jarring. “Okay, guys. Eyes on Alonzo from here on out.” 

“I don’t think that’s a man getting ready to run,” Leanna whispers. “Maybe Alonzo really is here to see his daughter get her happily ever after.”

Jack shrugs slightly. “Yeah. Maybe. But he's still got several hours to think about a lifetime behind bars.”

“Once the ceremony ends and the reception starts, people are gonna start moving around and things are gonna get chaotic. If Alonzo's gonna run, it'll be then,” Matty says. “So stay away from the champagne and stick close to our man. We can’t afford to let him slip through our fingers.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

* * *

WEDDING RECEPTION

JACK LOOKS LIKE HE’S ENJOYING HIMSELF WAY TOO MUCH

“Okay, everyone, check in.” Matty’s voice has a worried edge to it. Mac can imagine why, she’s staking everything on them being able to make Alonzo follow through on his promise. She’s assured them that if things go bad, the only person it will blow back on is her, but Mac still feels a vague twinge of worry twisting in his stomach, making it impossible to eat any of the  _ hors d'oeuvres _ on his plate. Or at least he’s telling himself that’s the reason for the anxiety gnawing at him.  _ I can’t think about Jack. I can’t. _

“North exit's covered. All clear by the food buffet,” Jack says. 

“Good here, south exit,” Bozer says. “Come on, Jack, it's right in my ear. Could you finish chewing first?”

“All right. All clear by the first east exit,” Mac says. “Leanna?”

“Doors to the garden are clear.” Leanna says. “The whole wedding party was taking their pictures out there earlier, but they’re inside now, and Alonzo is still with them.”

“Hey, here's an idea how about I take one for the team and I just guard this door the rest of the night?” Jack says, and Mac can hear the smile in his voice.  _ It doesn’t sound like he’s getting ready to leave us all. It feels like any other op. _ Mac’s trying not to think about all that too much. 

He’s distracted by chatter overheard on Riley’s comm feed. “Hey, hey, hey, gorgeous. Don't tell me a pretty girl like you doesn't have a date.”

“Actually, I do,” Riley answers, sounding annoyed. “His name's popcorn shrimp and he gets really jealous. Scram.” Her voice becomes a little clearer. “West exit's full of cheesy sleazeballs. But no activity.” 

“Target's headed towards the balcony,” Matty says. “I got him.” There’s the sound of rapid footsteps, Matty’s heels clicking against the shiny tiled floor. Her voice is a little more muffled now, but Mac can still pick out the words. “Don't get any ideas.”

“I don't remember sending you an invitation.” The voice isn’t exactly menacing, but Mac still doesn’t like the sound. 

“You didn't.”

“Well, that answers my question. Is there no trust between us?” Alonzo asks. 

“I trust that my people will be watching your every move until exactly 12:01 a.m., at which point today becomes tomorrow and you become mine.” Matty doesn’t leave anything to chance, ever. Mac remembers when her bulldog determination scared him. Now he appreciates it.  _ Because if Jack wants to stay, she’ll fight to make sure he gets to, right? _

“I give you my word, I'm turning myself in. But now, if you'll excuse me, I'd like to spend as much time as I can with my family before I become a permanent guest of the federal government.,” Alonzo says.

Mac swallows down the sudden pain in his throat.  _ He’s willing to do anything to be with his family right now, but he’s also willing to never see his daughter again because he’s going to a federal prison. I...I know Jack wants to protect us and maybe he thinks the only way to do that is to leave.  _ Suddenly, he just needs to be with Jack. Because if they’re about to lose him, Mac needs to spend as much time with  _ his _ family as he can.

He makes his way over to the buffet table, where Jack is, contrary to what Mac expected based on the munching sounds earlier and the comment about taking one for the team, staring into space with an only partly emptied plate in his hand. 

“Jack, what is this? You’re acting like it’s a funeral.” Mac says.  _ He was trying to keep it light earlier. I might as well try to do the same thing, I don’t want us to argue if this is one of the last times we see each other for a while. _ But he’s not sure how well he’s going to manage that. 

“I don’t know, man, you see these things, you wonder what you missed.” Jack sighs. “What you gave up because you told yourself it was worth the cost.”

“Is this about Matty and Ethan?” Mac asks. “Or are we getting personal here?” He shuts his comms’ transmission setting off, and sees Jack do the same. They can still hear if Matty says something’s going on, but she won’t be able to hear this conversation. 

Jack just shrugs. “I don’t know, man. Just...I wonder if it’s too late. If I’ve let things go too long.”

“It’s not too late until you’re in your coffin,” Mac replies, taking a bite of the biscuit-rolled sausage on his own plate and hoping he can keep it down. 

“Oh, dude, don’t say coffin.” Jack says with a shudder. “I have been in a  _ few  _ too many.”

“A few?” Mac asks. “That’s...kind of creepy.”

“You’re telling me.” Jack says. 

“Are you really going to take that offer?” Mac asks. He hates to be annoying and pushy, but he doesn’t think his stomach can really settle until he knows one way or the other. Not having an answer is pushing him close to a panic. 

Jack sighs. “I know this is freaking you out, kiddo.” He puts a hand gently on Mac’s shoulder. “And I am gonna sit down with Matty and Oversight when this op is over and we’re gonna figure out what we have to do, okay?” 

“Why can’t you just say no?” Mac asks. He knows he sounds like a petulant child. But he can’t watch someone else walk away.

“Because if I don’t offer something to compensate for not having me and my skill set and knowledge on that team, I could get forcibly recalled.” Jack takes a deep breath. “And because I need to know that whatever I do, all of you are going to be as safe as humanly possible, okay?” He meets Mac’s eyes, and there’s a world of guilt and pain in them. “I have to do the best I can with what the situation is, okay?” 

Mac nods. “I’m sorry for acting like this…”

“No. No, Mac, never apologize for standing up for what you need. I promise I am going to do everything in my power to make this work, to make them let me stay, okay?”

Mac feels a little of the awful tension slip out of him. Not much, but a little. “I know you just want to protect us.”

“That’s the truth, kiddo.” Jack says. “Whatever happens, I need to know you’re going to be alright.”

“I don’t want to be alright if you’re not.” Mac whispers. 

“I know. I know.” Jack reaches out and brushes a tear and a flyaway strand of hair off Mac’s cheek. “Hey, hey, it’s bad luck to cry at a reception. Or something like that.” 

Mac laughs weakly. 

“Do me a favor?” Jack asks. “Will you take this tray of little...I don't know...Weenie thingies to, uh, Riley? She's really been wanting to try one. And word to the wise, the grapes got seeds in 'em.”

“Got it.” Mac’s stomach feels a little bit better.  _ It sounds like he wants to stay, I think he’s putting up a good front so it won’t look like it kills him if he can’t. _ Mac had his suspicions about that threat of forced recall himself, even if Jack had been dancing around that particular topic.  _ Jack would at least want us to see him leave somewhat willingly. If we knew he hated it as much as we all did, we’d never stop fighting to get him back to us, and that’s not what he wants to see. _

Mac knows, because it feels all too much like the day the police knocked on the Bozers’ door. _I knew if I fought back, tried to protest, Boze and his sister and his mom would try to defend me too. So I went quietly._ _And...I honestly thought I deserved it. _

He tries to fake a smile before he gets to Riley’s table, but he’s pretty sure it’s a terrible attempt, judging by the look on Riley’s face when he sits down across from her. 

She doesn’t mention it though. It seems like they’re all tiptoeing around uncomfortable truths today. “Finally. I thought Jack was gonna polish off the whole buffet.”

“He left some for you,” Mac says.

“Oooh, he knows me well.” Riley digs into the stack of finger food.  _ My reaction to stress is to make myself so sick I can’t stomach anything, but hers clearly isn’t.  _ He can tell Riley’s thinking about what’s on all their minds, and finally she looks up, wiping her fingers on a napkin and meeting Mac’s eyes. “So what were you boys talking about? “

“Actually, I don’t know,” Mac says. “He started going on about missed opportunities and coffins. Well, the coffins were my fault, I guess.”

“Coffins? At a wedding? Great, Jack’s gonna be on the superstition train for the rest of the night,” Riley says. “But...missed opportunities? What’s that about? You think he’s actually going to leave us?”

“I am digging myself a hole,” Mac mumbles. 

“Guys, this soap opera needs to be put on hold!” Matty says. “At least until we have Alonzo in custody. How are we looking?” 

“There's no activity. Seems quiet,” Bozer says. 

“Yeah,” Leanna adds. “You think he's really here for her, or are we gonna have trouble?”

“Honestly? I don't know.” 

Mac flinches when his comms suddenly screech.  _ At this point I’m starting to agree with Jack that talking about the ease of a mission is a jinx. _

“Something's up,” Riley says. “I just lost the hallway in the north exit.”

“Can you get it back?” Matty asks. 

“Yeah, I'm working on it.” Riley continues typing on her tablet, then frowns. “Someone's locking me out of all the cameras. Matty, we got a situation.”

“Who's got eyes on Alonzo?” Matty asks. 

Mac looks up, seeing movement out of the corner of his eye. “I got him. He's headed toward the west exit. I repeat: Alonzo's on the move.”

“Do not lose sight of him,” Matty says. “Jack, Bozer, go join Mac. Riley, get me those cameras back. Leanna, get the car.”

Mac watches as Alonzo turns and opens a door, stepping through. “He just took a right halfway down the hallway. Any idea where he's going, Riley?”

“Looks like that goes to the indoor pool. There's windows in there, Mac,” Riley says. “He might be making a break for it.”

Mac glances through the door. “Um, I don’t think he’s going anywhere voluntarily.” He can see Alonzo standing near the pool, but there’s a second man with him, a man in a black stocking mask and dark clothes, wrapping an arm around Alonzo’s throat. “I need backup at the pool ASAP.”

He glances through the door, trying to decide on his best course of action. And then the guy holding Alonzo reaches into his pocket. Mac isn’t sure what kind of weapon he has on him, but he can’t wait to find out. He shoves the door open, and ignoring the sudden screaming pain in his leg at the rapid movement, dashes across the concrete, closing the distance between himself and the two men before the guy holding Alonzo has a chance to react to the surprise. He lands a solid punch on the man’s jaw, and he falls to the ground.

Alonzo doubles over, coughing, looking up at Mac. 

“Alonzo, trust me, you need to come with us, we’re your best chance…” Mac doesn’t get to finish his sentence, because a second shadow peels itself off the wall and throws itself at him, sending them both over the edge of the pool.

Mac manages to drag in a half-breath just before they hit the water, but the impact drives almost all of it back out of his lungs. He twists under the water, trying to find his direction. The chlorine stings his open eyes, but he thinks he’s righted himself. He’s bobbing up toward the surface when something grabs his jacket and pulls him back down into the dark water. Mac kicks out, and there’s a thump as his foot hits something solid, but he only seems to have pissed his attacker off. Hands latch onto his shoulders and begin pushing him down toward the bottom of the pool. 

His lungs are burning and the water feels like it’s roaring in his ears. He kicks again, but something drives into his stomach and he involuntarily gasps, pulling in a mouthful of water. Mac chokes, thrashing against the hands pulling him down.  _ Let me go, please... _

“Let him go, now.” the sound is faint and distorted through the water, but Mac recognizes Jack’s voice. Then there’s a thud and Mac feels the pressure on his shoulders suddenly release. He bobs to the surface, dragging in a grateful gasp of air. 

Someone grabs the back of his jacket and bodily hauls him onto the concrete. Mac rolls over, gasping, spitting out the disgusting chlorine taste in his mouth. 

“Hey, hey, kiddo, you alright?” Mac blinks up at Jack’s worried face hovering over him. 

“Uh…” He rolls over and coughs out a little more water. “Think so. What about Alonzo?”

“We got him,” Bozer’s voice comes from somewhere to the right. “Both those goons are taken care of, too.” Mac sits up a little, enough to see Bozer pulling a handcuffed Alonzo in their direction. “Dude, usually jumping in a pool fully clothed is for the bachelor party,” Bozer says.

“Yeah, Mac, what were you doing in here by yourself? You started the party without me?” Jack asks. 

“I didn't really have a choice,” Mac mumbles, sitting up a little more, shivering a little. His soaked clothes are clammy and clinging. Jack drapes a pool towel around his shoulders and hands him another one to start working on his hair. 

“Mac!” Riley races in, followed by Leanna. She kneels down beside him on the damp concrete. “I heard you hit the water and then your comms went out.” 

“I’m okay,” Mac says. He pulls off his jacket and wrings it out the best he can, then pulls it back on over his wet shirt with a shudder. “Just a little waterlogged.” 

“Jack, did you see my tackle? I put my shoulder into him just like you taught…” Bozer trails off, looking down at something on the ground. “Wait, is that on?” 

“Mm-hm” Jack picks up the cell phone from the ground. “Shh.” He ends the call that was on it, and sighs. “Bad news, Matty. Looks like one of these guys phoned a friend before we put him down for a nap.”

Leanna looks up from where she’s inspecting the body of the man she and Bozer just hauled out of the pool. “Okay, get this. No knives. No guns. Just zip ties and this bottle of chloroform.”

“Looks like the same thing on this guy,” Jack says, rolling over the man Mac punched earlier. 

Matty sighs over comms. “All right, these guys aren't here to kill Alonzo. They're here to kidnap him.” Mac can literally hear the frown in her voice. “I'm shutting this down. Time to get Alonzo out of here.” 

“All right, I'll get transport,” Leanna says. “Meet you guys outside.”

* * *

HOTEL POOL

NOT WHERE JACK WANTED TO FIND MAC

Jack’s heart almost stops at the sight of Mac thrashing and struggling under the water, held down by a dark shadow. He glances from the rippling water to the man on the cement starting to sit up, clutching his jaw, to Alonzo, bent over and coughing. 

“Boze, get that guy, and get Alonzo. I’m gonna help Mac.”

Bozer nods.

“Hey, let him go,” Jack shouts. “Now.” There’s no response from the figure in the water, but Jack can see a thin stream of bubbles reaching the surface, meaning Mac’s losing air.  _ Only a matter of time before he breathes out of reflex. _ Jack grabs a pool scoop laying nearby, swinging the long metal handle with as much force as he can and bringing it down on the head of the shadow in the water. The man is at least stunned, and what matters is, he lets go of Mac. Mac bobs up to the surface, and Jack reaches in and hauls him out by the back of his jacket like he’s a half-drowned kitten being pulled out of a rain barrel by the scruff of its neck. 

“Hey, kiddo, you alright?” Jack asks. Mac is coughing and spitting up water, but he’s breathing. 

_ Damn it, I wasn’t with him for five minutes and he almost got himself killed.  _ Jack can’t help but wonder what could happen to the kid without Jack watching his back.  _ He’s too damn self-sacrificing. He’ll get himself killed. _

Jack can’t leave. No matter what he has to promise or threaten to make that task force find a replacement. He can’t leave Mac. No matter who else is watching out for the kid, Jack has to be there. He has to at least be able to do something to bring Mac home alive after each mission. 

But there will be time to explain that to everyone later. Right now he has to make sure they survive the night. And that Matty doesn’t get in too much trouble to pull strings for him.  _ We have to get Alonzo into custody, now.  _

“Do you recognize these men?” Jack asks, pulling off the stocking masks to show the faces, while Riley snaps pictures to start facial rec. 

Alonzo shakes his head, still coughing slightly. “No.”

“Hey. Hey! This is no time to be withholding information there, Alonzo.”

“I swear I have no idea who they are.” 

“Well, clearly they know you and that you'd be here tonight.”

“Okay, come on,” Jack says, pushing Alonzo forward toward the pool door.

“Wait.” Riley cuts him off. “I got a few of my cameras back. There’s armed men about to breach the building through the west door. If we walk out there now they’re going to see us.”

“Okay, so, out these windows?” Jack says, turning around.

“That’s a negative,” Leanna answers for them. “Guys, I’m pinned down. I got to the car but I can’t get back to you. There’s men surrounding the whole building, covering all the exits. If you come out those windows, they’re going to light you up.” 

“I think I can get us out those doors,” Mac says. “I just need to break into that supply closet really quick.”

“What are you doing?” Alonzo asks, watching as Mac dumps pool chemicals and cleaning supplies into squirt bottles. 

“Smoke bombs.” Mac says, standing up, holding two bottles in each hand. “When I say go, Jack, Riley, push those doors open, and I’m going to throw these down the hall. It should give us enough cover to get to the lobby.”

“How are we going to get to the car?” Bozer asks. “There’s a lot of armed men between us and it, according to Leanna.”

“We’ll figure that out when we get there,” Mac says. “Okay, now!” Jack swings his door wide, and Mac flings two of the bottles out toward the entrance door. 

The five of them run toward the lobby in the chaos. Jack heard a few shots fired, but none of them seem to find a target. Still, when they all round a corner of a hallway, he pulls Mac, Riley, and Bozer around and gives them a cursory scan for any injuries.

“Mac, you think you could make something to lower us off that balcony in the reception area?” Jack asks. “Might at least give us the element of surprise.”

“Yeah, they had string lights, I could use those…”

“Okay, Matty, we’re coming back toward you, we’re taking Alonzo off the balcony.”

“Scratch that,” Matty says quietly. Jack frowns, but then hears the commotion over her comms. “Party crashers just took the ballroom searching for Alonzo. Tell me you have him.”

“Yep, he's with us.”

“Keep him away from here. Find some way to get him and his intel out of this building, and do it fast.”

* * *

THIS WEDDING RECEPTION JUST GOT A LOT MORE DANGEROUS

Matty braces for the worst when Riley loses the cameras.  _ I knew tonight was going to go wrong. _ Either Alonzo’s people are arriving to break him loose from her watchdogs, or one of the people who wants to kill him finally caught up. Either way, this isn’t good.

When they lose Mac’s comms in a splash of water, Matty almost loses her nerve.  _ If my choices got him hurt, or worse… _

When Jack confirms Mac is alive and safe, she breathes a huge sigh of relief. But there isn’t much time to be grateful for her agent’s safety, because in the next moment the doors to the ballroom slam open and a flood of men with guns enters.

The music stumbles to a halt, and people start screaming. Matty forces herself to stay absolutely calm. It’s far from her first hostage situation. She turns down her comms so that anything loud happening on the other end won’t be audible if someone's standing close to her. It doesn’t mean she’s safe from being discovered wearing a communication device, but it does mean she’s less likely to be caught.” 

A man who seems to be the leader begins shouting. “Listen up! Party's over. Everyone along the wall! Hands where I can see them. Move, move. Back. Back against the wall.” Matty watches the chaos as people panic and try to run. But the men are covering all the exits. 

Once the screaming has somewhat calmed, the leader begins speaking again. “If your name isn't Alonzo Olvera, you can relax, we're not here for you. Keep calm and you may keep your life. Now, if your name is Alonzo Olvera, I suggest you step forward, make this easy.”

Just then, Jack calls in, saying the rest of the team is en-route. But if they come this way they’re just going to deliver Alonzo to these guys practically in a bow. 

“Okay, so, if the balcony’s out, how are we going to do this?” She can hear Jack talking over comms. 

“I...uh…” Mac sounds shaky. Matty can imagine almost drowning wasn’t a great way to start the night.

No one’s having too much fun in this room either, though. The leader of the gunmen has walked up to the raised dias where the wedding party’s table is, and is leaning over the bride, menacingly. “Camila Olvera, congrats on your big day. You look lovely. Where's your father?” 

“I don’t know! What do you want?” Camila asks, eyes wide.  _ She’s never seen this side of the family business. No wonder Alonzo wanted her far away from it. _ The girl is like a frightened deer staring at a hunter’s rifle. “Here, the diamonds, you can have them, my ring, it’s worth almost thirty thousand…”

“I’m not here for the jewels. I’m here for Alonzo Olvera.”

“Look, this is her wedding day,” The groom says, standing up and trying to push the gunman away. The next second, the butt of the man’s rifle crashes into his head, and Matty sees blood stain the white tablecloth when his head hits it. Camila screams, and several of the guests do as well. 

“You remember when I said I wouldn't hurt anyone? Well, I lied,” The gunman snarls. “So, tell me where your father is before I start really hurting people.”

“No. No, no, I-I told you, I don't know!” Camila gasps, beginning to sob. “I don't know, please, I don't know.”

“Then I'll start with your family. Where's Grandma? Let's get her up here.” The man motions to two of his cronies, who drag an elderly woman in a navy-blue dress to her feet. 

“I told you. I don't know. Please. Don’t hurt Abuelita. I don't know. Please.” She crumples, gasping. “Please.”

“She’s telling the truth. She don’t know where the old man is,” One of the men holding the old woman says. “He’s already bolted.” 

“He can’t have gotten past our men. Two-man teams. Floor by floor. I want him found now! Move!” 

“Matty, what's going on? Everything okay? Talk to me, boss lady,” Jack says, and Matty realizes he’s probably been trying to get her attention for several minutes. 

“Ten hostiles just locked the guests in the ballroom to search for Alonzo. You got to get him and the evidence he's turning over out of this building right now. I hope you have a plan.”

“We have...twelve percent of one,” Jack says. “Mac and I are going to create a distraction, while Bozer and Riley get Alonzo out the door.” 

* * *

BOZER IS ONLY A LITTLE WORRIED THEY ALL MIGHT DIE

“Hey, Leanna, Mac’s got an idea to get Alonzo out of the building through the laundry room vents.” Bozer isn’t sure exactly how they’re going to get from their current location to the service level with two smoke bombs, the contents of a cleaning cart, and two mop handles, but he has faith in Mac’s planning. “If you can get the car moving, meet us there. Southwest corner, just west of the loading dock.”

“I think I can get there. I just have to take out the two guys guarding that loading door, and thankfully, Phoenix keeps our vehicles well stocked.” Bozer hears the click of a gun being readied. 

“Not sure if this helps our escape plan, but I got an ID on our pool posse,” Riley says. “They come from a domestic terrorist group called Chronos.”

“That name ringing any bells there, Lonny?” Jack asks.

Alonzo nods. “Chronos? Small-time.”

“Well, they just upped their game, big-time. Any idea why they'd be after you?” Bozer asks.

“We had a deal in the works a few months ago. They purchased hardware, a lot. But the shipment was seized by customs. They blamed me and they wanted their money back.”

“And I take it you didn't get around to giving them their refund,” Riley says. 

“Of course not. That's not how I operate. The buyer assumes all risk. I'm always clear on that.”

“Well, obviously, they didn't like the fine print,” Mac says. “Okay, I think this is all ready. Let’s go.”

“Wait, wait, wait. M-My daughter, my family,” Alonzo says. 

“Will be much safer when we get you out of here,” Jack replies. “Now, where was the evidence you were gonna turn over?” 

“On a tablet, locked in a safe. Suite 811,” Alonzo says.

“Great, how are we going to get there?” Jack asks. “There must be a dozen hostiles between us and that. I thought you’d have it on a flashdrive or something in your pocket, dude, seriously.” 

“Actually this might be doable,” Mac says. “We have a whole cartload of distraction materials ready, and we were going to have to split up anyway. Riley, do you have eyes on what’s happening again?”

Riley looks up from her own tablet. “Yeah, I got behind all the cameras, just not the electronic locks anymore.” 

Mac nods. “Okay, then you’ll be my eyes. Matty, Riley and I will go get the tablet. Jack and Bozer, take Alonzo to our original escape route. I should be able to draw off the guards and buy enough time for Riley to hack into the safe.”

“Wait, wait,” Alonzo says. “You'll need me to open the safe.”

“Why?” Riley asks. 

“The safe is biometric. You need a retinal scan to open it.”

“The specs for the hotel safes are simple keypads,” Riley says. “Nine-digit codes. How’d you get one with a retinal scan?” 

“The safe is mine. I brought it as an insurance policy. I had to make sure that you honor your end of the deal before I turn the tablet over.”

“Okay. So we’re just gonna haul Lonny boy back into the building where people are searching for him? There's got to be another way into that safe,” Jack says. “You can hack that kind of lock, right, Riles?”

“With my rig, sure. But this tablet doesn’t have the computing power to get behind a system that complex. The only reason I was able to get into the hotel’s is because it’s ridiculously outdated and hooked to their easily hackable main wifi connection.” 

Bozer frowns. “Here's an idea. We take the safe, we throw it out the window, and then we pick it up once Alonzo's out of the building.” Mac gives him a skeptical look. “What? It works in movies.”

Alonzo shakes his head. “That will destroy the evidence. My safe is packed with thermite. It's rigged to shock and tilt sensors. Anyone but me tries to open it or move it, that tablet will turn into a puddle of metal and plastic.”

“Thermite?” Jack asks. “I'm out of ideas, Mac. But that doesn’t mean I want you two out there on your own, kiddo. Not after the pool.”

Mac sighs. “I know, I don’t like it either, but we can’t all be in one place in here. Riley and I will go with Alonzo, I'll figure something out. Jack, the best thing you can do for us is try and pick off as many of our unfriendly guests as you can. Bozer, go with him.”

Bozer nods. He can tell Jack doesn’t want to leave Mac alone, that the near-drowning shook both of them. But they still have a mission. “Yeah, we can handle that. Let's go.”

Jack sighs. “All right.”

Riley and Mac hurry off down the hall. Jack watches them until they round a corner and disappear. Bozer watches a muscle in the man’s jaw twitch, and his throat work with a heavy swallow. 

“What now?” Bozer asks.

“Well, these guys are fanning out from the ballroom, so if we head that way, we should be able to find some punchfaces.” Jack slams his fist into his hand. “I need to break some noses.”

“Just save some for me too,” Bozer says. “They hurt Mac. I’m pissed.” 

Jack nods. 

“Are you really gonna leave?” Bozer asks as they start down the hall toward the ballroom. 

“Why is everyone asking me about this right now?” Jack asks. “I told Mac before. It’s not all up to me. Task forces like these are run by people used to getting what they want. And right now I’m what they want.” Jack sighs. “Boze, I know you’re the newest of us to the spy game. Still got the rose-colored glasses and all. But the truth is, for all that this job feels cool and special, we’re just employees like anyone else. And if I say no, getting fired doesn’t just mean losing my job. With what I know, it means a black site. For life.” 

Bozer sighs. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know…”

“It’s not your fault, Boze. Okay?” Jack says, pausing in his stride. “I just want you to understand how complicated things can get in this game. Okay?”

“I guess I kind of already knew.” Bozer sighs. “Because people like that sent Mac back to prison, back when he was still on parole. That’s the reason I didn’t want to be part of the Phoenix at first. I hated the idea that Mac was working with people who only saw him as an asset, and I couldn’t be a part of that.” 

Jack nods, and looks like he’s about to say something, but then stops, pulling Bozer back and pushing him into an alcove. “We got two bogeys in the hall.”

Bozer peeks around the corner. Two men in masks are moving room to room, checking the doors. 

“What do you think, Boze? Should we turn 'em into birdies?” Jack asks. Bozer blinks, Jack’s holding two golf clubs. 

“Where'd you get those?”

“Some dude musta got wasted and left these outside his door instead of puttin’ em in.” Jack hands Bozer one of the golf clubs. “Figuring we need to keep this nice and quiet.”

“A putter, Jack, seriously?” 

“It's titanium and graphite. Light in the hands, bad news for the face.” Jack takes a deep breath, bouncing a little and settling his stance. “Okay, Boze. Just...Remember to keep your left arm straight.”

* * *

“Okay, so how are we going to get to the eighth floor?” Riley asks, ripping the lower half of her long glittery skirt off and tearing the leg slit a little higher. “There’s armed men at all the stairwell and elevator doors.”

Mac frowns, shuddering and rubbing his arms. The AC in here has kicked on, and his clothes are still uncomfortably wet. “Um...see if you can pull up any schematics of this building.”

“I have the plans from when Matty sent us the location for the op,” Riley says. “What am I looking for?”

“The kitchen.” Mac says.

“How are we going to get to the eighth floor from the kitchen?” Alonzo asks.

“Well, we might not be able to. But it might be easier than the laundry room,” Mac says. “Just...trust me.”

“Okay, here’s the kitchen,” Riley says. “What are we looking for?”

“That,” Mac replies, pointing to the exterior wall. “They installed a dumbwaiter to take food to the terrace level. I saw an advertisement for catered events on the terrace and wondered if they did this.”

“Well, it’s an industrial model designed to handle large coffee urns and catering equipment, so it should be able to handle the three of us,” Riley says. “But Mac...the kitchen has an exit door, to a loading dock, and one of those goons is guarding it from the inside.”

“Well, then, we’ll just have to get past him.” 

“And how are we going to do that?” Alonzo asks.

“Trust me,” Riley says. “Mac is amazing at doing everything with kitchen utensils but cooking.”

“Okay, when it happens, it’s gonna happen fast,” Mac says. “When we get through the door, Riley, take Alonzo straight to the dumbwaiter. Don’t wait for me if I can’t get to you, just get that tablet.”

Riley nods. Mac pushes open the door, glancing as he does so at the racks of pots and pans, and everything else in arm’s reach. He reaches in just far enough to hit the light switch, plunging the room into sudden near-darkness, lit only by the bluish glow of what light from the windows reflects off the metal bowls and trays. The guard begins yelling in some foreign language, and a spatter of gunshots ping off the doors, but the three of them are already inside, using a large counter as cover. 

Mac reaches up onto it, feeling around until he finds the can of nonstick spray he saw when he looked inside. He grabs a box of long grill matches from the drawer under one of the ovens, and a bottle of vegetable oil from next to a large griddle. 

“Go! Go!”

Riley pushes Alonzo ahead of her toward the dumbwaiter door, and Mac leaps up, shoving a precarious stack of pots off a rack at the end of the industrial sinks, in the opposite direction of the dumbwaiter.

_ Hopefully he thinks we’re making a break for the door, or the windows. _

Mac twists open the top of the bottle of oil and starts dumping it on the floor as he runs toward the dumbwaiter himself. He can’t really see where he’s going, though, and the edge of a counter catches him in the hip, on the side with his bad leg. He gasps and grunts, curling in on the sudden sharp pain. 

_ Crap. I just alerted him to our position. _ Mac hears footsteps, and then a clatter and muffled Spanish cursing as the man slips on his oil trap and falls to the floor, probably grabbing at pot racks and whatever he can reach to slow his fall.

Mac stumbles toward the dumbwaiter. “Mac!” Riley hisses. “You okay?”

He doesn’t have time to answer, because as he’s reaching for the button to the dumbwaiter, a hand brushes his arm. Mac turns, throws a punch that goes wild, and then grabs the matchbox, striking one of the long matches and holding it up, pointing the can of cooking spray at it. The jet of flame sends his attacker stumbling back with a yell, and Mac grimaces at the smell of scorched hair. 

He slams his hand against the button for the terrace level and jumps inside just as the doors close, tossing the smoldering match and near-empty can of spray to the floor. He leans against the wall, panting, as the machinery whirrs and the dumbwaiter begins to rise. 

“A flamethrower? Jack is gonna be pissed he missed this,” Riley says. 

Mac just nods, starting to chuckle weakly.  _ Yeah, he will be. _

* * *

SOMEWHERE BETWEEN THE FOURTH AND FIFTH FLOOR

Riley watches Mac worriedly in the pale light of her phone flashlight as the dumbwaiter climbs. For all he’s insisting he’s okay after almost drowning, Mac is far too pale, and he hasn’t stopped shivering. She can’t tell whether he’s cold, or if it’s fear. 

“Hey, so, how are we gonna get out when we get to our floor?” She asks. “You sent us all the way to the roof.” 

“I’m going to activate an emergency stop,” Mac says. He’s prying off the cover of a small control box on the ceiling. “I just hit the button for the terrace to confuse anyone else. Just in case that guy back in the kitchen happened to see what I did.”

“That was pretty impressive,” Riley says. “You okay?”

“Aside from a few singed fingers from holding the match...yeah.” He looks up at the wiring he’s just uncovered. “Can you shine that light up here?”

Riley does, and Mac grabs one wire and pulls slightly. “Okay, we should be almost there…” There’s a soft click as the dumbwaiter passes the landing for the eighth floor, and Mac yanks the wire out. The dumbwaiter jerks to a stop.

“Riley, got anyone in the hall?” Mac whispers. 

She shakes her head. “Cameras say eighth floor is still clear. Looks like these guys are too busy dealing with Jack and Bozer.”

Mac pries open the doors, and the three of them tumble into the hall. Riley stands up, brushing off her hands and glancing down the hall. “811. There it is.”

Alonzo digs into his pockets and then looks up with a frown. “I can't seem to find my key.”

“Course not.” Riley shakes her head.  _ Jack would be saying this is just perfect.  _ “Um, any chance we can break it down?”

“If we do, we'll make too much noise and draw them to our position,” Mac says. “I got an idea.” He runs down the hall to the closet at the end, and starts digging around.  _ Well, things are either going to get messy, or smelly, or both... _ She’s honestly shocked when he comes back with a wire coat hanger, and starts unbending it. 

“What is he doing?” Alonzo asks. 

Riley shakes her head. “It's...better not to ask.”

Clearly, Alonzo doesn’t think she’s worth listening to. “How is that gonna open the door?” 

Mac begins working the coat hanger into the door. “Well, how familiar are you with lever arm distance, tangential force, and torque?”

Alonzo frowns. “I'm not sure what any of that means for getting past that lock.” 

Riley doesn’t either, but she knows Mac knows what he’s doing. “Uh, it-it means physics is awesome.”

Mac looks up at her for a second with a grin. “Well said.”

The door pops open, and Riley gives Mac a wide smile as he pockets the wire. But the next second, the stairwell door bangs open and two armed men rush into the hallway, yelling the second they see the team.

“Shit,” Riley hisses. “Get inside!” 

All three of them dodge inside, and Riley slams the door. “Hey Mac, I think your door trick kind of broke the lock,” she mumbles.

Mac sighs, running a hand through his still-damp hair. “All right. Alonzo, go ahead and get the tablet. Riley, help me with the furniture.” She nods, grabbing one arm of a large chair. “Okay, so we have a few things going for us right now...this hotel has been renovated recently enough, and is upscale enough, that these doors are probably rated for active shooter safety. And even if they weren’t, these Chronos guys seem to want Alonzo alive. Which means they’re probably not just going to shoot.”

“Well, that’s the good news, I get the feeling you’re going to tell me something bad now,” Riley says, straining to move one end of a couch.

“Well, yeah, I’m willing to bet these guys recognized Alonzo and called for reinforcements,” Mac says. “And it’s only a matter of time before we piss them off enough to make them decide that they’d rather just get their revenge by taking Alonzo out.”

Riley looks from the door to Alonzo. “All right, we need an exit. What about these windows?”

Mac shakes his head. “We're eight floors up, and by the time I could make something strong enough to hold us…” Mac sighs. “Well, let’s just say we wouldn’t need it. That chair isn’t going to hold them forever.”

Riley frowns. “So, if the windows and the doors are out, how are we getting out?” She glances over at where Alonzo is pulling the tablet out of his safe. The man looks visibly distressed. Sweat is standing out on his scalp, his breathing is audibly shaking, and his hands are trembling. When he hands the tablet to Riley, his face is ashen.  _ The fact that these guys are going to kill him if he doesn’t come with them is probably sinking in.  _

“The tablet is encrypted,” Alonzo says. “Three layers. The passcodes are…”

“Write them down,” Riley says. “Here.” She pushes the little notepad from the nightstand to him, along with a pen. Alonzo takes both with shaking hands.” 

Mac frowns. “Okay, we do not want Chronos to get you, or the tablet, but we definitely do not want them to have both together. If they realized they had their hands on the blueprints to a worldwide network of cartels and mobs...” He glances at Alonzo and Riley. “Riles, hang onto the tablet. “I’ll take…” He pauses, patting his still-soggy pockets. “Wait, that’ll ruin the ink. Alonzo, put those codes in your jacket pocket until we get out of here, okay?”

“And how are we supposed to get out of here?” Alonzo asks. 

Mac glances at the safe, and Riley sees a look she knows very well spread across his face. “I got a crazy idea. Riley, I need toothpaste. Alonzo, grab me that remote over there. And, uh, see if there's any chewing gum in the minibar. The kind with foil on it.” 

The next moment, he picks up a decorative vase from a table and tosses it at the framed mirror on the wall. Glass shatters and crashes to the floor. Riley winces. 

“Whoa, whatever your plan is, I hope it's worth seven years' bad luck.” 

“I'm only worried about the next seven minutes.” Mac is chattering a mile a minute the way he does when he’s got an idea, and Riley grins, watching him work. 

He holds up some of the thermite he’s taken out of the booby-trapped safe. “When lit, thermite undergoes an exothermic reduction oxidation reaction. Simply put: It gets really hot. But we need a way to direct the heat. Using this mirror, the toothpaste as an adhesive, and the thermite powder from the safe, I can create a makeshift breaching frame.” Riley watches him smear the toothpaste around the frame and add the powder.  _ He has way too much fun with this kind of thing, I swear. _

“Wrap some tinfoil around both ends of the remote battery,” Mac says. “I’m gonna use it to light the thermite.” Riley nods, and hands him the battery when she’s finished.

“Okay, this is gonna get hot. Stand back,” Mac says, touching the sparks to the thermite. There’s an instant blinding flash, and Riley can’t help but be impressed when Mac shoves the mirror frame forward and a whole chunk of wall falls away. 

“Go, get through,” Riley says, shoving Alonzo forward. He seems too stunned to move, but finally he scrambles through the hole.  _ Yeah, I kind of forget how impressive Mac’s parlor tricks are when I see them all the time. _

The door to the room behind them slams inward, and Riley flinches. 

“If we run, they’re going to chase us,” She whispers. “We’ve got a tactical advantage bottlenecking them coming through your door.” Mac nods. “Let’s stay here and finish them off.” 

She pulls off her heels, glad this isn’t the room with glass on the floor. They’re not tall, but the heel spikes still make a decent weapon. She’s taken out more than one bad guy with her shoes.  _ Who said these aren’t practical combat attire?  _

She can hear the men coughing on the smoke in the room, but then they must catch sight of the hole. Mac tucks himself back against the wall, fingers clenched white-knuckled around a lamp. Riley pushes Alonzo into the corner behind her, out of view of the opening. The first man steps through, clearly disoriented by the smoke. Mac brings down the lamp on his head, and he crumples to the floor with a groan. 

The next second, the door to the room bursts inward. _Damn it, they decided to outmaneuver _us. Riley raises her hands slowly...then flings her shoe at the first of the men. 

The first guy bends sideways with a yell of agony, hand clasping his arm where the heel gouged him. Riley covers the distance between them in a moment and slams his face into the coffee table, then grabs a chair and swings it at the next man, catching his gun arm and sending the weapon skittering across the floor. 

She glances at Mac, who’s gasping, stumbling backward, hands at his neck, clutching desperately and wheezing. He’s managed to disarm the goon he was fighting, but the man has gotten hold of Mac’s tie and is choking him with it.  _ I have to help him. _

Riley shoves Alonzo to the door. “They want you! Go! Get out!” He does, face grey, eyes wide. Riley can see a vein throbbing in his neck.  _ He’s gonna have a damn heart attack on us. _ She’s glad she made him write down those codes.  _ Wait, he still has them on him… _ But it’s too late, he’s out the door. And she needs to save Mac.

Mac’s fighting desperately, clawing and kicking, but his struggles are weakening. His face is red and his eyes are wide with panic.

“Hey, you bastard,” Riley yells, and then slams the man with a solid right the moment he turns toward her. She shakes out her fist, bending down next to Mac, who’s fallen to his knees, trying desperately to get his breath. 

Mac rips off his tie, throwing it aside and leaning forward heavily, panting. “Hey, hey, you okay?” Riley asks, leaning down in front of him. She gently pushes the collar of his shirt open, wincing at the reddened marks overlaid on the still faintly visible neck scars from Murdoc’s collar.  _ Damn it, he was just getting okay with wearing a tie again. Now he’s traumatized all over again. _

“Next time...I’m gonna go with Jack’s advice...and wear a clip-on,” Mac pants.

Riley sighs in relief, falling back onto her heels.  _ If he’s making a joke he’s more okay than I thought. _ She finds herself always preparing for the worst possible reaction to any damage inflicted on Mac, and sometimes it’s easy to forget he’s moving on and getting stronger.  _ Doesn’t mean he won’t have nightmares tonight, but at least he doesn’t act like he’s going to have a panic attack on me now. _

“Where's Alonzo?” Mac asks. 

“I sent him out.” Riley says. “Didn’t want those guys grabbing him in the commotion.”

“Where is he now?” Mac asks. 

“Um…” Riley grabs for her own tablet, but fumbles with an empty flap of her purse. “Damn it, Mac, he took my tablet.” She checks quickly, pushing down panic, but Alonzo’s tablet is still tucked safely in the more secure inner compartment. She wills her hands to stop shaking.  _ This could be worse. It could be worse.  _

“He must have thought it was his own in the chaos,” Mac says. “Guess he decided to split after all.”

“Or trade everything on that tablet for the safety of his family,” Riley says. “Either way, if we don’t do something fast, we’re going to lose him and all his intel.” 

* * *

Mac cringes at the frustration in Matty’s voice over comms. 

“Hold on, you're telling me that you have your hands on the tablet, but then you lost Alonzo and the codes?”

Riley frowns, leaning over one of the fallen Chronos goons and grabbing his sidearm. “ Um… “Lost” may be a little harsh, more like temporarily misplaced. He couldn't have gotten far.”

Mac nods. “You search floor by floor, I'm gonna head downstairs and see if he decided to use that tablet as a bargaining chip.”  _ Riley’s right. Very likely Chronos has him spooked. He was worried about his daughter and the rest of his family when we were going to evacuate him. And I’m sure they’d be willing to cut a deal in exchange for everything he has there _ .

Jack speaks up. “You know, Chronos actually did us a favor by locking all the exits. If there's a silver lining here, it's that we know Alonzo's still in the building.”

Mac listens to the continuing chatter as he pushes open the stairwell door.  _ Riley counted ten two-man teams in the halls, and last we know Jack and Bozer took out six guys, and Riley and I got four more. And the guys in the pool aren’t going anywhere, which should only leave the three guarding the ballroom, so I should be safe to move around here.  _ “That doesn't make me feel much better, Dalton. I went way out on a limb to make this deal with Alonzo. If he burns me…”

“He won't, Matty. We're gonna find him,” Jack assures her.

Mac rounds the turn of the staircase to the landing of the fifth floor and stops. “Actually, I just did.” 

“Excellent,” Matty says. “Keep him where he is.”

Mac kneels down beside the body. “Well, that shouldn't be a problem; he's dead.”

“Dead? What do you mean, dead?” Bozer asks. 

“I mean his heart's not beating and his lungs aren't drawing breath.” 

“Bet he had a heart attack after all,” Riley says. “I didn’t think he looked good.”

“Stairs, the true silent killer,” Jack says, and Mac can hear him panting. He can also hear the thud of boots on more than just comms. Jack and Bozer must be coming his way. 

“Get the paper with the codes out of his pocket,” Riley says. “And see if he still has my tablet.”

Mac reaches into the man’s jacket, fumbling through every pocket.  _ It’s not here. The codes and the tablet are gone.  _ He even checks Alonzo’s pants pockets, but there’s nothing aside from a collection of disgusting kleenex. Mac grimaces and wipes his hands on his pants.  _ Guess even crime bosses get really emotional at their daughter’s wedding _ . 

“Guys, someone got to him before I did. Whoever they were, they might even have killed him. But they definitely stole Riley’s tablet, and also the paper with his passcodes.”

“Do we really need those?” Bozer asks. “If Riley still has the real tablet, can’t she just…”

“Nope,” Riley replies. “I got a look at the encryptions on this thing. Enter the wrong code twice and this thing will wipe itself. I can’t hack it. I need those codes or this is just a worthless hunk of silicon and plastic.” 

Mac can hear her voice normally as well as over comms, and in another moment she’s kneeling down beside him. “Hey, Mac, look at this.” She rolls Alonzo’s wrist over. “Does that look like a puncture wound to you?”

“Sure does,” Mac says. “Unless he’s really bad at fastening cuff links, guys, I think Alonzo was poisoned.”

Jack and Bozer step up onto the landing. Jack leans over, hands on his knees, breathing heavily, and Bozer rests against the wall. “Hang on, hang on a second now. I know I'm no math genius, but last time I checked, six plus four is still ten. Bozer and I took out six goons, Mac and Riley took out four. That's ten scumbags on ice. So, if we took them all out, who got to Alonzo?”

Riley shakes her head. “Guys, I don't think this is Chronos. Not unless they suddenly changed their plan from kidnapping Alonzo to poisoning him.”

“Wait, what are you saying? Someone else killed him?” Bozer asks. 

Jack nods. “Someone unaffiliated with the terrorists we took out; that's what it looks like.”

Matty sighs. “Okay, guys, listen up. Our witness is dead and his evidence is missing. If we want any hope of salvaging this op, we need to find Alonzo's killer and get those codes back. How are we supposed to find this mystery murderer?”

Mac glances at the body again. “All right. First thing we need to do is identify the poison. Riley, can you get me some laundry detergent?”

“Yeah.” She hurries off, down the stairs. 

“Bozer, come with me, kitchen,” Mac says. “Jack...stay with the body. When the killer realizes they have the wrong tablet, they might come back to see if they can find the right one.” Jack nods.

Once they make it to the kitchen, Mac removes a UV light from a self-sanitizing stove vent hood while Bozer scrounges the cupboards for a bottle of vinegar and a box of baking soda. “This should work,” Mac mutters, scrambling down from the counter, grimacing at the growing ache in his leg.  _ I’m not supposed to be doing this much strenuous activity.  _ “I think we should take the elevator back up.” 

“You okay?” Bozer asks, and Mac can’t bring himself to answer.  _ Not really, I mean, I almost drowned, almost got choked to death, and my leg is killing me. And, you know, we’ve still got three armed terrorists and a mystery killer on the loose.  _

When he gets back to the stairwell, Riley’s already there, holding a bottle of liquid detergent in her hand. “Hey. Does this work?” 

“That is perfect.” Mac takes the bottle from her, then sets down the rest of the ingredients.

“Hey, hold on, I don’t see how making a sixth-grade science fair volcano is gonna solve our problem,” Jack says. 

Mac grins.  _ He’s getting me talking, he can tell I’m stressed.  _ “It's difficult to identify a poison without an actual lab, but I might be able to narrow down our options with a few household ingredients. I just need to mix a few drops of Alonzo's blood with vinegar, baking soda, and a fluorescent agent, shine a UV light on it, and hope for a little luck.” He pulls out his knife and slices into Alonzo’s palm. Bozer makes a gagging sound and turns away. 

Jack frowns. “Okay. I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say I do not want to know how you learned to identify poisons with household chemicals.” Mac turns on his makeshift UV light and holds it over the dish. “Hey, your blood potion thingy’s glowing now. What does this mean? Are we summoning a demon here?” 

Mac looks up at him, then down at the bowl in front of him. “This blue-green fluorescence under a UV light means he was killed with cyanide.”

“And how does knowing this help us?” Bozer asks. 

Jack answers for Mac. “Different poisons have different amounts of time to fatality. Given his weight and how quickly his symptoms progressed, I'd say he was dosed...eighty minutes ago, give or take.”

Bozer frowns. “Hold on. That would mean that Alonzo was injected at the reception while we still had eyes on him. Before Chronos arrived. But the only people here during that time were guests and staff. Was Alonzo killed by someone at the wedding?” 

Mac nods, pinching the bridge of his nose. He’s tired and hurting and he’s cold again, the warmth from running around the hotel has worn off and his suit is still clammy. “Well, whoever did it, they're still in the building right now. We just need to keep them here.”

Matty speaks up. “Okay, well, there’s still three men with guns in this room, so that should be easily accomplished, but they’re getting twitchy. Wondering what happened to their search parties.”

“Ah, Matty, that might get even worse really soon,” Leanna says. “I’m still outside, and I got police scanners activated. Someone in that ballroom called 911 and we have cops inbound. Probably five minutes out.”

“And when they show up this is going to get a whole lot worse,” Jack says. “This hostage situation could get messy if more guns get involved. Leanna, stall those cops as long as you can without letting them know we’re agents operating on American soil, okay? Bozer and I will neutralize the threat in the ballroom.”

“How are we gonna do that?” Bozer asks. 

“Well, these dudes have comms,” Jack says. “As do the fellas we conked out. Which means if we go back and find a couple of our buddies in the broom closet, do a little tweaking and send a really annoying signal on their frequency, we can disorient the men in the ballroom long enough to take them out.” 

“So you do listen to me occasionally!” Riley says. “I’m so proud, my dad finally learned how to use electronics.” 

“Very funny,” Jack says. 

“Okay, whatever you’re doing, do it  _ now, _ ” Matty says. “Jack, Bozer, see if you can solve our problem before the police show up. Mac, Riley, go get me back those codes.” 

Mac stands up. “Yes, ma'am.”

* * *

Riley listens to the thuds and groans over comms as Jack and Bozer take care of their part of the plan.  _ Jack actually had a really great plan for how to do that. _ She’s been trying not to think about him leaving, she hopes he won’t, but it’s been at the back of her mind this whole time. 

_ If he leaves, and it’s up to me to keep us all together, can I do it? _ She knows she’s the next in command, no matter how unqualified she feels to be there.  _ Mac is only a level three agent, Bozer and Leanna are level two, and without Cage here, I’m the most senior field member of this team.  _

She’s not sure how she’ll juggle being the eye in the sky and the watchdog with a gun.  _ I always counted on Jack to have our backs, knowing he was there to protect us meant I could work without worrying about the rest of our group. _ If he’s gone, her stress level is going to skyrocket.  _ I know they can all take care of themselves, but... _ if anything happened, she’d feel personally responsible.

She bites her lip and tries to push the thoughts out of her head.  _ Get that intel Matty wanted on Alonzo’s organization. Maybe she can use that as the bargaining chip to get Jack off the… _

The truth hits her in a wave of stunned realization.  _ That’s been her game the whole time. It’s why she took the risk, why she’s so worried about losing. _ Matty is trying to get her hands on the trump card, on the one thing the intelligence community might think holds more worth than Jack’s knowledge of Kovacs.  _ She’s going to trade that tablet for Jack’s callback.  _

The things that have rubbed Riley the wrong way about this op from the start suddenly make sense.  _ She wouldn’t make a deal with a risky target like Alonzo for anything less than this. And she went ahead and did it herself because Jack is on a clock for making his choice.  _ Riley knows that strings can be pulled, that even if he refused he could get dragged back anyway.  _ Things like this, you know it’s not really a choice. You know they’ll only be happy if you say yes. _

The second Matty heard Jack was being tapped for the op, she must have gone after the biggest fish on her waiting list.  _ Alonzo’s criminal network is as big a get for an agency as Kovacs would be.  _

If they want a prayer of Jack being able to make his own choice in the matter, no matter what he decides his duty is, they need that intel. Which means they need those codes. 

As if thinking it has brought them into existence, Riley steps into a small empty room and sees a familiar folded piece of paper on a small round table. 

“I have eyes on the codes.”

She reaches for the paper, to check and make sure.  _ Someone could have made a copy, but they’re still useless without the tablet.  _ She unfolds the paper, it is in fact the codes they need. She recognizes Alonzo’s shaky scrawl. 

“Riley, say again. You found the codes?” Matty asks. 

“Yeah, I got it. The paper was right here in the game room, on the table.”

“Wait, it's just sitting on the table?” Jack asks, and she can hear the hint of worry in his voice. 

“I guess the killer decided it was useless without the correct tablet and ditched it.”

“That doesn't sound right,” Mac says. “I'm coming to you.”

Riley starts to tuck the paper in her purse when there’s a sudden bright light in the corner of her vision, and a staticky buzzing sound. Riley has just enough time to realize she’s walked right into the trap before the world goes black. 

* * *

Mac winces as his comms shriek into his ear. “Jack, I thought your little trick was only supposed to mess up their comms!”

“It was, and we’re done,” Jack says. “Bozer and I are making ourselves scarce before the cops show up and start wondering who used SWAT level tactics on our gunmen friends.”

“Then that must have come from...Riley, Riley, are you still there?”

There’s no answer. 

“Guys, I can’t get Riley on comms. I think something’s wrong.”

“Cops are entering the building now,” Matty says. “I’m stuck in the ballroom because they’re interviewing all the guests. What's going on, Mac? I need an update.”

“Last she checked in, she was in the game room,” Mac says. “I’m almost there…” he pushes open the door, then glances down. Riley is lying unmoving on the floor. “Yeah, I found her, she's unconscious.” He bends down, reaching for her wrist. “And her pulse is racing.” He rolls her over, and then stops, a cold chill running down his spine at the sight of her shoulder. “She's...she’s...she’s got a fresh puncture mark on her arm.”

“What?” Bozer asks. 

“Mac, Mac, are you, are you saying Riley's been poisoned?” Jack sounds about two seconds away from freaking out.  _ I am too, but that won’t help us at all. We’ve got to do something or she’s going to die.  _

“Yeah. Whoever attacked Alonzo also got to Riley.”

Jack and Bozer hurry through the game room doors, and Mac hears an audible cry of pain from Jack as the man skids to his knees on the carpet beside Riley’s still body. Mac knows that sound all too well, it’s Jack helpless to stop whatever bad thing is happening to one of his kids in front of him. Jack looks up, dark eyes shining with unshed tears. “This is bad, this is really bad.” His voice cracks on the last word.

“How long does she have?” Bozer asks. 

Mac swallows hard. “Well, considering she's half Alonzo’s size, not long.”

“There’s cops here now, can we take her to them?” Bozer asks.

“Paramedics aren’t onsite yet,” Leanna says. “The ambulance team got caught in a traffic snarl on the highway and had to reroute. ETA is ten minutes at least.” 

“And by that time it might be too late,” Mac says. “Jack, help me get her to the kitchen, I got an idea. Bozer, go flag down the medics as soon as they show up, tell them we have a cyanide poisoning victim, and bring them to us.”

“Got it.” Bozer runs off. 

“She’s gonna be okay, right?” Jack asks. Mac looks up at him, but he can’t answer. He glances from Jack’s too-bright eyes to the limp body in the man’s arms.  _ We can’t lose her. We can’t.  _

* * *

“What's going on, guys? How's she doing?” Matty’s questions are whispered, but they feel all too loud in Jack's ears. Riley feels too heavy and too light in his arms at the same time.  _ She hasn’t looked this bad since...since Cairo.  _ Jack never wanted to see his baby girl this close to death again. 

Jack lays her down on the kitchen counter Mac points out, then leans over her, checking her vitals with shaky hands. “She's barely breathing. Doesn’t have too long left. Mac. Mac, talk to me, you have a plan, right?” Jack says. “Right?”

“Yeah, I just need to gather a few things.” Mac is rushing around the kitchen, slamming drawers and moving pots and pans around. 

“What do you need?” Jack asks, desperate to do something. “Mac, just tell me what to do.”

“Turn the stove on, get that pot heating,” Mac says. “Here, dump this in.”

“This is tile cleaner!” Jack says. 

“I know!” Mac shouts. Jack sighs.  _ He’s already freaking out, and I’m going to make it worse, but damn it I’m freaking out too. _

“Kiddo, I trust you. I do. But this is Riley’s  _ life. _ So I’m just double checking.”

“Mac, please tell me all that banging means you found everything you need,” Bozer says. 

“I have everything except one thing.” Mac pulls a serrated knife out of the knife block, and before Jack can stop him, slashes it across his inner forearm. Blood spills from the cut into a bowl. Mac grimaces and presses a dishtowel against the wound, picking up the bowl and dumping it into the pot Jack’s stirring.

“Blood?” Jack asks. 

“Whose blood?” Bozer practically yells.

“Mine,” Mac mumbles. Jack tries not to look at the reddening towel that’s hastily and loosely tied around Mac’s arm. 

“Do we even want to know what you're doing?” Leanna asks. 

Mac starts talking a mile a minute, tossing things in the pot and apparently doing five things at once while Jack watches with his own spoon raised, totally at a loss. “Yeah. The key to making an antidote to a cyanide-based poison lies in the 3-MP amino acid found in the human body, which helps us process natural levels of cyanide found in fruits and vegetables. Muriatic acid from tile cleaner, sulfur from match heads, hydrogen peroxide, and blood; in this case, mine. Mix everything in a pot, heat it, strain it, and though it seems gross, you've actually made an antidote for cyanide poisoning.” He grabs the measuring cup of liquid and dumps it into a spray bottle, then reaches for Riley’s head, tilting it upward. “Breathe it in like a nasal spray, and hopefully Riley doesn't die.” He grimaces. “Sorry, Riles. This is gonna suck.”

Jack watches, frozen, as Mac finishes spraying his makeshift antidote into Riley’s nose.  _ Come on, baby girl. Breathe. Wake up. Please.  _

Suddenly, Riley starts coughing, rolling over and gasping for air. Mac practically collapses, and Jack catches him by the arm unthinkingly, wincing when Mac makes a sharp cry of pain; Jack’s fingers have closed tightly on the gash in his arm.  _ Damn, kid, I don’t need you half-killing yourself too. _ The towel wrapped around Mac’s arm is soaked in blood. 

“Talk to me, someone, Mac? Dalton?” Matty’s voice wavers.

“She's okay. She's okay,” Jack says. “Nice work, Mac.” Mac makes a shuddery sigh of relief, leaning heavily against the counter as Riley sits up. 

“I didn’t even have any of the champagne. Why do I have a killer hangover?” Riley mumbles, pressing a hand to her forehead. 

Mac chuckles weakly, and Jack wipes a hand across his face in relief. 

“Uh, that’s because you've been poisoned,” Mac says. “The killer used the codes as a trap, and then they ambushed you.”

“Damn it, they got Alonzo’s tablet too,” Riley says. “Unless you found my purse with me.”

“No, we didn’t,” Mac says. 

“Did you happen to get a good look at 'em?” Jack asks. “Just tell me who I gotta go punch.” 

Riley shakes her head. “No, they came up from behind.”

Mac sighs, rubbing his hand over his face, the still-bloodied one. Jack grimaces at the sight of the red streaks on his cheeks and forehead. He’s got to get a better bandage on the kid’s arm before  _ he _ bleeds out.  _ Tonight has really really sucked.  _ “Well, whoever they are, they now have the codes  _ and _ the tablet, together, which is very bad.”

“And they're still in the building, the cops aren’t letting anyone leave.” Matty adds. “Riley, is there anything you remember?”

Riley shakes her head slowly, frowning. “I saw the paper on the table, I went to get it. There was a flash of light. Pretty sure I was hit by a stun gun.”

“A stun gun?” Mac asks. “Guys, I think I know how to unmask our killer.”

Jack grabs him by the shoulder before he can rush out the door. “Whoa, whoa, hoss, no one’s going anywhere till we patch up that arm.” He points to the saturated towel now dripping blood onto the tile. “Listen, I’m glad you did what you had to do to save Riley, but...I’m not lettin’ you kill yourself for it, okay?”

“Guys, I know I just almost died, but...what does that wound have to do with saving my life?” Riley asks, starting to swing her legs over the side of the counter. 

“Whoa, hey, no getting up just yet. Bozer’s coming with paramedics,'' Jack says. “We need to make sure Mac’s cure actually worked.” He groans. “I cannot chase both of you around insisting on proper medical attention, now, okay?” He grabs a first aid kit off the wall and opens it up.  _ Good thing industrial kitchens are prepared for knife accidents.  _

“And about the...ah…” Mac gasps as Jack tightens a compression bandage around his cut. “Blood...I kind of needed it as an ingredient for the antidote.”

“The stuff you sprayed in my nose?” Riley asks with a grimace. “I kind of wish I hadn’t asked.” 

* * *

Mac pulls the sleeve of his black jacket down over his arm, squares his shoulders, and glances at Jack. “Well, should we do this?”

Jack nods. 

_ We have to somehow unmask a murderer, without tipping off the cops about who we really are. No big deal, right? _

Mac pushes open the door to the ballroom. The officers are still talking with the wedding party. It sounds like they’re asking about the father of the bride, and Camila is almost hysterical, answering that she doesn’t know, and begging to be allowed to go with her new husband in the ambulance. 

“I think I can answer that for you,” Jack says. “Alonzo Olvera’s in the stairwell, fifth floor.”

“Go, now.” The officer in charge says. “Who are you?”

“One of his bodyguards,” Jack says. “Hired for the event, this is my partner.” Mac nods. Hopefully the cops will buy that, and also not dig too deeply and decide they’re going to bring Mac and Jack in for questioning about working for a known crime boss.  _ But I’m sure Patty will take care of everything discreetly before it gets that bad. _ “And...um, there’s no need to have your men hurry. I’m sorry, Camila. Your father’s been murdered.” 

“What?” Camila gasps, then begins to sob.    
“Your only job was to protect my son from those men with guns,” The grandmother says, turning on Jack. “And you let him die?”

“Actually, we caught them all, but none of them murdered your son,” Mac says. “Alonzo was poisoned. We still don't know who it is. That's what we're trying to figure out.” 

“No.” Mac can only imagine how horrible this day has become for Camila.  _ She should have remembered this as one of the happiest days of her life. And instead, her husband is in a coma and her father is dead.  _

Jack picks up where Mac trailed off. “It was introduced by a puncture wound to his neck, which means that whoever did this, they got close. It was someone that he trusted.”

“You think it was someone I invited to my wedding?” Camila whispers, her eyes horror-stricken. 

Jack turns Mac and Camila away from the cops. “Couldn’t have been  _ just  _ anyone. The killer had to have known that Alonzo struck a deal with the U. S. government. Whoever it was had a lot to lose if Alonzo shut down his organization.”

“My dad made a deal?” Camila asks, swiping at the tears and makeup running down her face. Jack nods. 

“Yes. We were gonna take him into custody after your wedding.”

“But why would he do that?”

Jack gives her a sad glance Mac knows all too well, a look that means he can’t make anything hurt less but he can at least try to offer some small comfort. “Because he was tired of running, and because he wanted to be here for you, to walk you down the aisle.”

“S-So someone killed him for wanting to do what's right?”

Mac nods. “Yes, but they didn't just poison Alonzo. They also poisoned one of my co-workers, and that second attack is how we're gonna ID them.” He has an idea, maybe a little crazy, but he thinks it’s going to work. 

“How?” Jack asks. 

“Well, when Riley was attacked, there was a strange interference on our comm channels, which means the killer is using a stun gun. But they were also carrying a device that reacted to the electrical charge in the stun gun by broadcasting feedback.” Mac reaches for the DJ’s mic. “Don't have a stun gun on me, but microphones pretty much use the same frequency, so…” He holds it close to each person in the wedding party in turn, ignoring the weird stares from the police officers.  _ Up to now they probably assumed Jack and I were hired muscle, more brawn than brains. But now I’m confusing them. _ He really hopes this works, or someone might start wondering whether he and Jack have anything to do with what happened to Alonzo.  _ I mean, we did know exactly where the body was... _

And then the microphone starts giving off feedback. Several of the closest guests flinch and cover their ears and Jack grimaces, it’s so much worse in his comms, like the sound when Riley got attacked. Mac sweeps the mic back and forth until he pinpoints the source of the distortion. He looks up into the angry brown eyes of Camila’s grandmother. 

“ _ Mi abuela _ ? Is this a joke?” Camila asks hotly. 

“It's not.” Mac points to the woman’s wrist. “This medical alert bracelet was what caused the feedback that we heard.” Her hand sweeps toward his arm, but Mac is quicker, and catches it, pulling something off her ring finger. “That's a lovely ring. A poison ring tipped with cyanide. This is the murder weapon, and this is the murderer.”

The police officers start moving in, and one pulls out cuffs and slaps them on the woman’s wrists.

“Hey, and that purse. It isn’t hers. Belongs to our co-worker who got poisoned,” Jack says. Mac reaches for the strap and pulls it off the woman’s arm, checking quickly to see whether the tablet is still inside. He breathes a hasty sigh of relief when both it and the paper with the codes are visible. 

“Abuela? Please tell me that this isn't true,” Camila says, starting to cry again. 

“Your  _ abuelo _ and I started this business from nothing,” the older woman says sharply. “And I promised him years ago I'd never let anything destroy it.”

“Even your own son?” Camila asks. 

“Especially my own son. He, of all people, should have known. Don't you see, mi nieta? This is your  _ abuelo's _ legacy, and your father was gonna burn it all down.”

Jack shakes his head. “I think you mean did burn it all down. Your organization is going to be completely wiped out. You and everyone in it are going to jail for a very, very long time.”

Mac cringes when an officer walks up to him and Jack.  _ I really hope they don’t start asking a lot of questions we can’t answer.  _ But then Matty steps in between, holding up her phone. “Officer, there’s someone on here who needs to speak to you.” Mac gets a glimpse of the phone screen, it reads “Oversight”.  _ Patty coming through for us. _

Matty takes the purse from Mac, looking inside. “Thank you. I only hope this was worth it.” Mac glances at where paramedics are wheeling a protesting Riley out to an ambulance on a stretcher.  _ I hope so too. _

“Okay, kiddo, let’s get you home and into a hot shower,” Jack says. Mac nods, leaning against Jack’s warmth. His clothes are still clammy and clinging, and warmth sounds heavenly. “Well, after we take both you and Riley to Phoenix Med.”

“Why?” Mac asks.

“Because you are bleeding through that bandage on your arm,” Jack says, pointing. 

“Oh.” Mac sighs. “Can’t you just put in stitches at home?”

“I’d rather get you checked over. And it sounds like there might be a little water in your lungs too.” Jack shakes his head. “Besides, I’m sure Riley wants some company. I’ll bribe you both to stay put in medical for half an hour with hot chocolate, how’s that sound?”

Mac manages a grin.  _ As long as Jack’s going to stay with us, I guess it’s not so bad.  _ “Well, glucose is an accepted treatment for low body temperature and it’s thought to reduce the effects of cyanide, so…”

“So is it a deal, you nerd?” Jack asks, ruffling Mac’s hair. 

“Yeah. It’s a deal. You know, some people think that Rasputin survived an assasination attempt by cyanide because the killers hid it in sweet pastries?”

“You should tell Riley that,” Jack chuckles. “Her sweet tooth might have helped save her life. Maybe Alonzo should have had a few more of those cupcakes.” He wraps an arm around Mac, and Mac leans into the warmth. “Alright, let’s get outta here.” 

* * *

PIZZA PARADISE

RILEY KNOWS THIS MEANS IT’S SERIOUS

Riley pushes her slice of greasy pepperoni pizza around her plate with her straw. She’s too tense to eat it, even though this is normally her favorite pizza in the whole world. She’s even too tense to make straw wrapper caterpillars with Mac.

Then again, Jack seems pretty serious too. Riley steels herself for what’s coming.  _He talked about Kovacs a little when we first got partnered up, we took down one of his subordinates. I can’t believe he’s still alive. And I know that’s got to be bothering the hell out of Jack. Even if Matty bargained with the powers that be, he might still decide he has to finish what he started. That he failed all those years ago and he has to make it right. _She knows Jack doesn't like leaving loose ends. And Kovacs is a hell of a loose end.

“So?” Mac breaks the silence first, his voice just a little shaky. “Why did you ask us out to lunch here?”

Jack smiles, and Riley can’t read the expression in his eyes. “I figured I should tell you kids first.”

“You’re leaving, aren’t you.” Mac’s voice is flat and sad. “Taking that assignment they offered you overseas.”

Jack frowns. “Hell no, Mac. Matty worked her magic and I’m off the hook. They can get someone younger to cross off that son of a bitch. Someone without a family. Which is what I actually wanted to talk to you both about.” 

“Okay?” Riley says. It’s the only thing she can manage. _ He’s not leaving, so what is this about? _

“I...well, this concerns both of you. Riley, I need your blessing, and Mac...I need you to tell me a stepmother and stepsister are okay additions to your life.”

“Wait, you want to marry my mom?” Riley asks. 

“I think a proposal is a little overdue, but I’m not gonna wait any longer.” Jack says. “If that’s okay with the both of you.”

“Hell yeah,” Riley says. “I’ve been watching you two trip over your feelings for a year and a half. Longer, if you count that failed dating thing from years ago. So if you back out on this, I will push you down on one knee myself.” She chuckles. “Just kidding. Mostly.”

“Wait, I have to be  _ her  _ brother?” Mac asks, shooting Riley a fake disgusted look. “I don’t know if I can handle that.” 

“Come on, it’s not like I’ve ever  _ not  _ been your big sister,” Riley says with a grin. “Besides, you sprayed your blood in my nose just yesterday, so that’s like one of those weird sibling bonding things already, right?”

Mac laughs. “At least we won’t have to share a room or anything. But sibling rivalry, that’s  _ so on. _ ” 

“Hey, if you two can’t play nice you’re both getting grounded,” Jack says. 

“Ha ha,  _ very _ funny, Dad.” Riley throws a pepperoni at him, and he tosses a straw wrapper at her, and then they’re all laughing, harder and louder than they have in a very long time. 

* * *

NOT PIZZA PARADISE

JACK ACTUALLY VOLUNTARILY WORE A TIE THIS TIME

“Well, this is...impressive,” Diane says, sitting down gracefully in the chair Jack pulls out for her. “When you asked me if I wanted to go out to dinner, I thought you meant coneys.”

“Well, I was going to, but I’ve got a day left on this suit rental and I figured I’d make the most of it,” Jack says with a chuckle. 

“Has anyone ever told you you’re a terrible liar?” Diane asks.

“Repeatedly.” Jack sits down across from her. “If I told you Riley hacked the place’s registration system to get me a reserved table on short notice, would you believe that?”

“Actually, I might,” Diane says. “But remind me to scold her later about breaking the law.”

“Just bending it a little,” Jack says. “See, I was gonna take you to the coney place, but then Riley insisted I have to do this right…”

“Is this what I think it is, Jack Dalton?” Diane asks. 

“Depends on whether you think it’s a proposal.” Jack says, kneeling down beside the chair. “I was gonna wait till we got dessert and do something really cheesy, but I think the problem with us is we’ve kept waiting for the right time and missing it. So, without further ado…” He pulls the ring box out of his jacket pocket. “Diane Davis, will you marry me?”

“Yes. Yes I will.” 

* * *

MAC AND JACK’S HOUSE

MINUS ONE RING IN A DRESSER DRAWER

PLUS ONE MOM

“Okay, so, get this, the waiter tells me I can’t kiss her!” Jack says. “Now, what’s the point of taking your finance to a nice restaurant to propose if you can’t kiss her once you put the ring on?” 

“That’s probably because your definition of kissing is a little too PDA for them,” Riley says. 

“Gross, I do not need to think about my parents  _ kissing, _ Riley!” Mac tosses a rubber duck in her direction, for some reason Bozer bought a whole case of them once for a movie and Mac (and Mickey, more frequently) still find them in random places around the house. 

“So what did you do?” Bozer asks.

“Ditched the place and went for coneys.” Jack chuckles. “And then came by to crash you kids’ party.” 

“Sounds fun,” Riley says, grinning. “Hey, who wants a drink?”

“I’ll take one, honey,” Diane says. 

“As long as you’re up, I’ll have one too,” Jack says. Mac moves to sit next to him, and when Diane takes Jack’s hand, the firelight glints off the diamond on her finger.  _ It’s hard to believe that...that she’s about to be Jack’s wife. And my mom. _ Mac swallows a sudden lump in his throat. He hasn’t had a real mother since he was five. It feels...strange, in a good way.

Jack’s phone buzzes, and he lets go of Diane’s hand to fish it out of his pocket. He glances at the screen, a frown creasing his formerly smiling face. 

“What’s happening?” Riley asks, sitting down with her hands full of bottles. “They didn’t...they didn’t recall you? Right? I thought Matty made sure...” Mac can hear the worry in her voice, and the bottles are clanking together sharply as her hands start shaking. 

“Nope. This one’s not about me.” Jack sighs. “Damn it, Dez. Gotta be the knight in shining armor, don’t you?” 

“What?” Mac frowns. 

“Old CIA buddy. Went straight into long-term radio silence ops after she graduated, so I haven’t heard much from her in years. But apparently the CIA just kicked her out for going rogue.” 

“And now they want us to bring her in?”

“Not exactly.” Jack sighs. “She just told me herself.” He looks up. “She’s been blacklisted, which means her only shot at getting a legit job that isn’t flipping burgers, is us. Matty can pull some strings for her. I told her to come to L.A., I’ll get her squared away.” He glances up at Mac. 

“She’s lucky to have you as a friend,” Mac says. “You always look out for your people.”

Jack smiles. “Well, guys, I hope you’re all ready to meet the only person who’s ever out-shot Jack Dalton.”

Mac raises an eyebrow.  _ Well, this sounds like it’s going to be...interesting. _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, from here on out...things are going to be a wild ride. I've officially departed from canon with no possibility of return, and I guess it's time to do what Mac does best and improvise. A LOT.


	16. K9+Smugglers+New Recruit

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, here we go, first of the episodes with Jack still in them! Hope you enjoy!

###  315-K9+Smugglers+New Recruit

CIA TRAINING FACILITY AKA “THE FARM”

2007

_ Jack takes a deep, steady breath, lining up his shot. He’s a Delta Force operator and an EOD overwatch. He can’t let these rookies show him up.  _

_ He’s the oldest recruit in this training class. Which means he’s got as much to prove as the green kids who’ve never seen a day of combat.  _ It would be all too easy to call me ‘washed-up’, say I’m burned out and scratch me.

_ Which means he needs to not just keep up with the rest of his class, but he needs to prove that his experience is valuable. That the extra years his training officers could see as a potential problem are an asset.  _

_ His shot goes true, striking center mass of the target. He stands up and jogs on through the woods to the next sniper nest on the course map, keeping up the steady pace he’s maintained for the entire section of field certification tests. Not so fast he raises his heart rate and makes it harder to slow his breathing and line up shots, but fast enough that in a field situation he’d be out of sight long before anyone responded to the report of the gunshot.  _

_ Jack slides into the next sniper nest, crouching down against the chilly damp wind blowing over the course. The wind and increasing rain are going to complicate this training exercise for most of the green recruits, but Jack has made kill shots in almost every type of weather someone could experience. A little rain is nothing. He squints through the mist and tightens his finger on the trigger. _

_ By the time the test is over, the rain has tapered off, and a weak sun is shining through pale grey clouds. Jack shoulders his rifle, and slogs back to the base camp, mud clumping and sucking at his boots and pantlegs. Still, he considers it a good day. He’s pretty sure he finished the course in what should be a record for the agency’s sniper training unit here.  _

_ “Well done, Dalton,” Agent Emmet says as he steps into the command cabin. “Second fastest time in the class. Which happens to have been a good three and a half minutes better than the last record for the Farm.”  _

Wait. Second fastest? _ Jack sets down his rifle in the corner and glances around the room. Aside from the agents in their standard fleece jackets with the training camp logo on them, there’s only one other person here in full combat gear.  _

_ The trainee who beat his record is a slender girl with straight black hair in a ponytail. Jack thinks he’s seen her around the campus, but these first few weeks there have been a lot of faces to keep track of, although the roster is steadily dwindling. Weeding out those who can’t cut it in the field.  _

_ She’s got her hands, still in the partly fingerless sniper gloves, wrapped around a foam cup of coffee. There’s mud splashed from her boots to her knees on the front of her tac pants, and to her waist on the back.  _ She was moving fast. Risky in this weather. _ No wonder she beat Jack’s time, if she threw caution to the winds like that.  _

_ Normally, Jack would take one look at that kind of recklessness and decide this trainee was never going to make it. Maybe through the Farm, but not in the field. But there’s something in the determined set of the shoulders, the sharp snap of fire in the dark eyes when he catches her eye over her coffee cup.  _

_ This isn’t a showoff, or a rebel with a chip on her shoulder. This is just someone who knows exactly what she’s capable of. She knows what she wants, and she’s determined to make it happen.  _ She didn’t take a lot of unjustified risks just to win. She did what she did because she knew she could.  _ Cockiness gets agents killed, but confidence, in their skills, in their potential, gets agents home alive. And Jack sees a survivor.  _

_ The girl stands up when Jack walks over to her.  _

_ “Never thought I’d see the day someone would out-shoot me,” Jack says. “Who are you, kid?” _

_ “Desiree Nguyen.” The girl holds out a hand. Jack can see a tattoo, red and green in some kind of floral design, snaking up the back of her arm. _

_ “Well, it’s a pleasure to meet you, Agent Nguyen.”  _

* * *

MAC’S HOUSE

PRESENT DAY

Mac rubs his leg scar as he steps out of the shower. It’s healing pretty well, as far as his scars go, and fading fairly nicely. He swallows back the bitterness in his throat when he looks up and sees the still vivid lines on his chest and neck.  _ The ones I really wish would disappear probably never will.  _

Still, he’s been trying, using the same things he was told about how to help his surgical scar heal with as minimal visibility as possible. It’s probably too late for most of it, but he figures it’s worth a try, rubbing the same lotion he uses on his leg onto the ugly, twisted M.  _ I can’t wait until it’s healed enough for Jack’s cousin to do that tattoo.  _ Then at least the mark on his body will be one he chose, rather than something Murdoc inflicted on him as a vicious brand. 

Mac frowns. It sounds like Mickey is barking. He hastily pulls on a pair of sweatpants, but he can't find his shirt in the laundry bin, and it was gross and sweaty anyway, so he just wraps a towel around his shoulders. 

_ Mickey probably just got stuck in the cupboard door again. _ Mac’s got the one that covers the trash can on springs, so it closes tight, but Mickey has learned to paw it open and get inside anyway. 

By the time he steps out of the bathroom, the barking has stopped. Mac sighs.  _ Great. I came out here for nothing. _ He grimaces as the slightly chilly air hits his still-damp arms. _ Thanks a lot, Mickey. _

“You’re not Jack.” The voice is right behind him.

Mac doesn’t scream. He doesn’t have the ability to make a sound at all, really. He spins around, grabbing frantically for something, anything, he can use to protect himself. His fingers close on the cane he’d been using while his leg was first healing.  _ I hope it’s enough… _

He doesn’t know who could have gotten in here, but there’s only one person coming to mind.  _ No, no, no. _

His head is swimming and he thinks he might pass out. He can’t afford to pass out, he has to protect himself.  _ And what has he done with Jack? Is that why Mickey was barking? How did he get past them... _ Mac swallows a horrified sob at the thought of Murdoc callously drawing his gun and shooting Mickey and Jack just because they were in his way.  _ Because they tried to defend me... _

And then rational thought kicks in and tells him that he didn’t hear any gunshots, and more pertinently, that the person he’s seeing across the room can’t possibly be Murdoc. 

Mac blinks at the woman sitting at his desk, her feet propped up on the edge of the wood, eating out of a bag of barbecue chips. Her black hair is a lot shorter than the photo Jack showed him a couple days ago, and there’s a lot of tattoos that she didn’t have then, but Mac recognizes Jack’s fellow farm graduate and recently fallen from grace CIA agent.  _ Desi Nguyen. _

Mac takes a deep breath, trying to get his racing heart under control.  _ It’s not Murdoc. Not Murdoc.  _

But the feeling of being trapped and exposed and defenseless isn’t fading. He clutches the towel a little tighter around his shoulders, hoping it covers the twisted scar on his chest, hoping he wasn’t already careless enough to show it. He doesn’t want to have to explain that terrible letter he’s been marked with. He slowly sets down the cane and twists his other hand into the towel as well, pulling it as closed as he can. 

“N...No.” It’s the most he can muster. He’s not sure what else to say, but Jack solves that for him, bursting in through the door a second later, gun drawn, with Mickey right behind him, hackles raised. 

“Mac!” Jack shouts, then stops, seeing the bizarre scene playing out in front of him. Mac has to admit, under other circumstances, this might actually be funny. But all he can think about is that he feels horrible, frightened and defenseless and too exposed. The towel around his shoulders isn’t good enough, he wants one of Jack’s sweatshirts. There is one, laying on his bed from him sleeping in it last night, but he doesn’t want to take off the towel to put it on.  _ How weird will I look to her if I put the sweatshirt on over the towel? _ He immediately discards that idea, though, then she’ll know he’s got something he’s trying to hide. He settles for stepping in a little bit behind Jack and wrapping the towel as tightly around his shoulders as he can.  _ No one is going to take it away from you… _

He tries not to think about Murdoc’s cruel taunts and the blanket he kept offering and then taking away when Mac was locked in the cellar.  _ He kept telling me I had to earn it.  _ Mac shivers, and he can’t tell if it’s because of the memories or the drops of water chasing each other down the back of his neck. 

“Desi?” Jack asks. “What the hell are you doing?”

“Testing your situational awareness. Or trying to.” She shrugs, tossing a chip in the air and catching it in her mouth. “Found your roommate first.”

“Actually he’s my kid,” Jack says.

Desi rolls her eyes. “Played it fast and loose more places than the field, huh?”

“Not my  _ biological  _ kid, Des. Adopted.” 

“Figures. He looks nothing like you,” Desi says. 

“Damn it, you scared the hell out of me,” Jack says, holstering his gun. “Came in from the garage and found the dog locked in a closet, freaking out. And...I thought something happened to Mac.”

“Oh, your dog’s a sweetheart,” Desi says. “He was a little mad when I climbed onto the porch, but luckily I always carry food.” She pokes an empty package labeled ‘Beef Jerky’ on the desk. “But he did clean me out of the last of my snacks. Which is why I broke into your kitchen cupboards before coming in here. Word to the wise, the barbecue’s fine, but spicy ranch is a lot better.” 

Jack sighs as Mickey walks up to Desi, nuzzling her hand. “Mac, your dog sold us out for jerky.” 

“As I recall, Dalton,  _ you _ would sell someone out for jerky.” Desi smirks. “I happen to think he’s just a very good judge of character and knows I’m trustworthy.” She ruffles the fur behind Mickey’s ears, and Mac wishes he could feel as relaxed around her as his dog seems to.  _ She wouldn’t have hurt me, I know that. But she startled me. _

Picking up on his tension, Mickey tenses too, pulling out from under Desi’s hands and moving to Mac’s legs, standing protectively. 

Desi frowns, as if she’s just realizing something is wrong here. The slight gleeful smirk she’s had since Mac first saw her has faded away.  _ She was gloating over one-upping Jack, but he’s clearly not enjoying the joke, and it looks like she’s trying to figure out why. _ Mac was sure the two would have some level of professional rivalry, Jack told them all enough about his history with Desi to know that, but Mac didn’t expect her to break into the house. 

Jack sighs, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “Um...good to see you, Dez.” 

“You too, Dalton.” Desi stands up, and walks over to him. “Two things. You’re out of chips,” She crumples up the bag and tosses it behind her, landing it perfectly in the trash can by Mac’s desk. “And...you’re dead.” She slaps a piece of paper with the word “Bang” scrawled on it in sharpie onto Jack’s forehead. 

Jack sighs and pulls the paper off. “Are you seriously still on this?”

“Last time I checked, the game was still going.” Desi frowns. “Twenty-eight to thirty-two,” she says with a raised eyebrow. “Well, twenty-NINE.” 

“What  _ is _ this?” Mac whispers, but Desi overhears. 

“Little game Dalton and I had going at the CIA. I beat his sniper score, and he was kinda pissy about it, so we agreed to a rematch. On our terms. Any time, anywhere, the other person was fair game, and if we could take them down, we’d do this to prove it.” She shrugs. “He  _ was _ better. But we’re about to find out if that’s still true.”

“Hey, I still have three kills on you,” Jack insists. He nods out the door. “You eaten breakfast yet? We just got back from a run, so we haven’t.” Mac gives him a grateful look.  _ He’s getting her out of here so I can get dressed in peace. _

“Actually, I bought donuts,” Desi says. “Including the disgusting fritters you like.”

“Those are not disgusting!” Jack says, his voice fading out as the two make their way down the hall.

“Then why do you always call them ‘floor sweepings’?”

Mac shakes his head, looking down at his still trembling hands clenched so tightly in the towel that his knuckles are white. It takes a good five minutes before he feels safe enough to take it off and trade it for a t-shirt, a long-sleeve henley, and Jack’s sweatshirt over  _ that. _ It’s not really cold enough to warrant that many layers, but he thinks he’d feel naked with any less. And at least the sweatshirt hood rests high enough around his neck to cover that scar. 

He tucks his hands into the sweatshirt pockets and joins Jack and Desi in the kitchen, where Jack is better than halfway through his donut and Desi is waving a piece of a jelly-filled one around on the end of a fork. 

“So get this, they tell me, ‘not enough manpower’.” She sighs, jamming the fork in her mouth and mumbling around the bite of donut. “Not enough manpower my ass. They didn’t care. If he’d been outed, he’d lost any usefulness to them.” 

“I knew Franco was a son of a bitch, but damn, that’s cold even for him,” Jack says. “Never liked the guy.”

Desi scowls, swallowing. “Yeah, well, I told him where he could stick it, and went anyway. Probably why I got canned instead of just demoted.”

“Yeah, that’d do it,” Jack says. “I was surprised they totally blacklisted you.”

“Yeah, well, apparently I’m ‘unpredictable’ and ‘lack basic respect for authority’.” Desi says, cutting another piece off her donut with her fork. “I had a good record, but Franco’s got his friends. Still, I wouldn’t do it differently.”

She glances at Mac when the floor creaks under his foot. “Sorry about the scare.”

“Uh, no harm done.” Mac stares at the floor, instead of her face. He can’t look at her after that. 

“If I’d known Jack had you around, I’d have asked what you liked,” Desi says. “But it’s been hard to stay in touch. Only reason I knew where you lived was calling in a favor with an old friend in records every year when I sent the Christmas cards.” She pushes the box of donuts toward Mac. “There’s a few of a lot of things in here.”

Mac digs around until he finds one covered in crushed peanuts. It’s the least sugary option, and while he normally prefers the cream filled ones, he’s already feeling a little like he might puke, and that much sweet would definitely push him over the edge. 

“I’ll have to introduce you to the rest of the team,” Jack says. “Unless, you know...you already showed up at their houses unannounced.”

“Last I checked, you were the only one I had a bet with that had twenty Rolling Stones and Bob Seger original LPs riding on it.” She shrugs. “I don’t have any reason to show up and scare the shit out of them. Yet.”

Mac forces a chuckle and another swallow of donut.  _ I’m fine, it’s fine.  _

* * *

THE WAR ROOM

EVERYTHING AND NOTHING DESI EXPECTED

When Jack said he knew someone who could pull strings and get her clearances back, Desi hadn’t realized at first he was talking about the one and only Matilda Webber.  _ I knew she left the CIA for another black budget agency, but I didn’t realize it was the same one Jack worked for. Plus, last thing I knew, they hated each other’s guts. _

“Agent Nguyen,” Webber says, when Desi follows Dalton and MacGyver through the doors. “It’s good to see you again.” 

Webber wasn’t her handler, but the two of them had crossed paths a few times, briefly. The most Desi knows of the woman is by reputation. Whispers of ‘Matty the Hun’ that no one ever wanted to find out made it to her face. The one and only time they had a real conversation was before Desi shipped out for Bangladesh.  _ Right before Webber left the agency.  _

“Good to see you too, Director.” Desi could joke around with Jack, but she made sure to wipe all the powdered sugar and crumbs off her shirt before showing up here. She’s abundantly aware of the need to stay in the good graces of this agency. 

The three other agents in the room turn toward her. She recognizes Davis, Jack’s old CIA partner. But the rebellious kid with a talent for flouting authority has grown into her potential. Desi can see it in the set of Riley’s shoulders, the tilt of her head as she assesses the new blood. She’s an agent in her own right.  _ The few letters from Jack that got through to me after they got paired up told me he thought of her as his own flesh and blood. And now she practically is.  _

On the way over, Jack explained more of his complicated situation. Apparently he’s marrying Riley’s mother, has adopted ‘Mac’, the kid she scared in the house, and has paperwork in the system to adopt Riley as well. 

_ “I figured that would disqualify you all from working on the same team. Family connections are a liability, or at least they were to the CIA.” _

_ Jack shakes his head, then turns the radio up a little louder as a Metallica song starts, shouting to be heard over the heavy bass. “Like I said, Matty’s more of a pushover than you think. She let Leanna and Bozer date, even when they transferred to Phoenix.” _

_ “Well, that won’t be a problem for me.” Desi’s never dated and has no desire to. The few people who got pushy about it, insisted she’d like it if she tried it, got a very quick and painful demonstration of the only physical activity Desi wants to engage in with other people.  _ It’s not like I’ve never done things for the job, but that’s different. _ When it comes to her personal life, Desi is perfectly happy on her own. It’s less complicated, and it solves a lot of problems before they ever start.  _

The two agents standing close together near the window, Desi guesses, are the mentioned Bozer and Leanna. They’re practically holding hands. 

Jack steps up front, next to Webber and a tall agent with silver-streaked dark hair pulled into a severe bun. 

“This is Desiree Nguyen. We trained together for the CIA.” Desi gives the whole group a cool nod. “Desi, this is Oversight, Patricia Thornton, Director Matty Webber, and my team. Riley Davis, Angus MacGyver, Wilt Bozer, and Leanna Martin.”

“I’m sure you’re all dying to know everything about me, so I’ll save you the trouble,” Desi says, tossing Davis a flashdrive. “My whole file is there, unredacted. All the details, all the dirt. Failed op in Palermo, suspension in ninth grade for flooding the high school gym, and what got me kicked out of the CIA and dropped me on your doorstep.”

“About that,” Thornton says. “I’ve read your file, but the information your superior included was less than flattering. Dalton insisted you deserved a chance to speak for yourself, so I’m willing to hear you out on your side of the matter. But I need to know that you didn’t just bail on people counting on you for no good reason.”

“Of course.” Desi knew she was going to have to get this out of the way. She’s explained herself a dozen times, but she gets the feeling that here, people will actually listen. “My cover was with an arms dealer’s organization that was embedded with Afghan locals. I was cultivating a CI, someone who’d reached out from within the organization, Ibrahim. Roofer by trade until these guys came into the village and forced everyone to work for them or face a firing squad. Wife. Two kids. Maniac for chocolate, so I knew I could trust him right away. He was a good man. He wanted to help rebuild his country.” She shakes her head. “His wife Lina kind of took me in. We grew close. One day, she comes to me crying. The arms dealers found out somehow that Ibrahim was stockpiling information on them. They dragged him out of his own home in front of his family.”

She feels the hot surge of anger in her chest and stamps it down. This is not the time or the place to appear out of control. She’s sure there’s a note on her file for violence against a superior.  _ So what, Franco deserved a lot more than a fist in the jaw. _

“I put a special request to break my cover and lead a rescue mission. Superiors rejected it. "Not enough resources," they said. “Your cover is more valuable.” That answer was unacceptable. So I went rogue. I found the militants’ compound, extracted Ibrahim, and snuck him and his family to safety over the border.”

“With no backup?” Thornton asks. Desi sees a professional respect in the woman’s eyes. 

“Resolve beats numbers any day. And I would do it again in a heartbeat. Ibrahim and his family are safe, and I don’t regret what I did. Not even if they have thrown me out for it.”

“That’s what I was hoping I’d hear from you,” Thornton says. “I like to think I’m a good judge of character, and that final report was so unlike the rest of your file I had a feeling someone took a personal vested interest in getting you fired and blacklisted.” 

Desi nods. 

“Welcome to the Phoenix, Agent Nguyen,” Webber says, handing her a badge, a lanyard, and a small key fob. “You can requisition personal gear from our tactical unit, and if you’ll stop by the labs later this week our head of R&D will set up your personal Phoenix logins and credentials.” 

“How’d you like to start by getting thrown in the deep end?” Jack asks. “We were gonna head in already for an op when you crashed the party.” 

“Sounds good,” Desi says. “I just spent two days sitting on my ass driving cross country. I could use a good dust-up.” 

“Well, I’m not sure that’s exactly what this is going to be, but as long as you’re on board…” Jack turns to Matty. “You get the information I sent?”

“And set up a briefing packet.” Webber says, turning on the screen at the front of the room. Jack gives her and nod then turns back to the assembled team.

“Okay, so I got a call from an old friend, Maria Ramirez, who is now an ATF field agent and needs our help with an op. Maria and her partner Cody have been trying and, unfortunately, failing, to take down a group of weapons smugglers based in Northern California, and for some reason, these guys are always a step ahead.”

“What kind of weapons are they moving?” MacGyver asks. He’s frowning, twisting something silvery in his fingers. Desi glances at it, it looks like he’s taken one of the paperclips from...the massive bowl of them sitting on the table in the middle of the room.  _ Well, that’s a little odd. _

“Ghost guns,” Jack says. 

Davis nods, turning to a confused-looking... _ Boxer? No, Bozer _ . “They're called ghost guns because they're made from parts with no serial numbers, making it impossible for them to be traced.”

“I’ve run across shipments of those before,” MacGyver says. 

It’s a perfectly normal observation and yet something about the way he says it ruffles Desi’s sense of odd. She’s not much of a people person, especially normal people who aren't hardened criminals and killers, but she wouldn’t have lasted this long in the field if she didn’t have some ability to read a situation or a comment, and this one doesn’t track. 

_ What does that mean? Did he work with a different agency and team before Phoenix? He doesn’t look old enough to have. And why does that name sound so familiar? _ Desi is woefully behind on pretty much...everything.  _ Spending decades out of the country in deep cover means you have no idea what’s happening in the world unless it involves terrorist attacks, human traffickers, or smuggling operations.  _ Pop culture has taken a big backseat to fitting into shady organizations. As has any and all U.S. news, even from the agencies, that isn’t pertinent. But somehow, she thinks MacGyver’s name has come up. At some point.  _ Was he some agency golden boy who got in a mess like me and ended up here?  _ She’d like to get a look at his file. But for some reason it’s been marked at a higher clearance level than even Jack’s.  _ Which is why it feels like someone’s pulling strings for him.  _

MacGyver sets down the thin wire (it was definitely one of those paperclips) that has been formed into what looks like the target inside a gun scope. “They’re a big issue for law enforcement.”

“And three hours ago, Maria got a tip: a massive shipment of these ghost guns is arriving at the Port of Eureka, California later today. If these guns hit the streets, a lot of innocent civilians and police officers will die. But Maria and Cody are trying to find the shipment of guns before that can happen and she needs us as backup.” 

“Okay, but why us? I thought she was with ATF, shouldn’t they be working with her?” Leanna asks. 

Jack shakes his head. “That is because on a couple of recent busts, Maria arrived to find that the smugglers had inexplicably moved the product right before the raid. Then, some seized weapons went missing from the ATF evidence locker.”

Davis nods knowingly. “Which can only mean one thing. Someone in the ATF is working with the smugglers.”

“And we have no idea who, which is why Agent Ramirez can't trust anyone at the Bureau,” Jack continues. “But if we stop this shipment, I believe that we can get enough intel to not only stop the smuggling ring, but also smoke out the ATF's double agent.”

“Since you vouch for Maria, I assume she's not a double agent, but what do we know about this Cody guy?” Bozer asks. 

Jack grins. “Cody is, uh, not working with the smugglers.”

“You sound certain,” Desi says. She can’t resist the chance to needle a little, see whether Jack is the same as she remembers.

“Trust me.” Jack gives her a wink. “He’s not.” He turns to Matty. “Riley, Mac, Desi and I will be meeting Ramirez at the port. Bozer can help coordinate from here, and Leanna, could you get to work seeing if you can trace out the mole?”

“Of course.” Leanna reaches for her computer. 

Matty nods. “Good luck.”

“Okay, let’s move,” Jack says. They walk back out to the parking lot and the pale blue convertible parked there. Desi frowns. She wondered about the car back at the house, but there was some weird tension with Jack and MacGyver, that was probably her fault for breaking in. So she hadn’t wanted to push things. It feels a little less strained now, and she finally voices the question. 

“What happened to the GTO? Not that I’m complaining about the Shelby, but…” Jack was joined at the hip to that car, last Desi knows. Arguably as protective of his baby as she is of the Mustang. 

“Well, she kinda bought it out on the desert on the way to Vegas,” Jack says. “Mac had them tow her back, he’s got a friend who has a garage, we spent some time working on her on Mac’s injury leave the past few weeks.”

“Only thing I could salvage was the body,” MacGyver says. “And only parts of that too. But Jack and I are gonna put her back together. Just...slowly.” 

“Yeah, we are.” 

Desi frowns, trying to read the conversation happening under the one she can understand. Because clearly they aren’t just talking about cars anymore.  _ This sounds very, very personal. _ But without knowing more about MacGyver and Jack and their past, she can only guess. And one thing Desi’s learned is that making assumptions, especially about fellow agents, rarely ends well. 

* * *

PORT OF EUREKA

HOME TO LOTS OF SEAGULLS

AND APPARENTLY ILLEGAL GUNS TOO

Jack parks the Shelby at the pier and climbs out. Mac follows him, letting the sea air and sunlight wash away the tense feeling that’s been hanging over him since Desi Nguyen showed up in his bedroom. 

_ She seems totally unfazed, she’s barely even looked at me since.  _ He guesses maybe he should be grateful for that. It means she doesn’t have any interest in him, for any of the reasons people have in the past.  _ Clearly, the way we met didn’t make her think anything different of me. Unless it’s that I’m woefully unprepared for the field. _ After all, she’d said she was testing Jack's situational awareness.  _ She probably thinks I’m going to be a problem. _ He’d guess that’s why he’s been getting what feels like the cold shoulder.  _ I guess it’s the same every time we add someone to the team. I have to prove myself all over again. _ But he thinks he’s up to the challenge. 

A tall woman with tawny skin and curly mahogany hair steps out from a black SUV, then opens the back and whistles. A slim, black and tan German Shepherd leaps down, and she fastens a leash to his thick collar.

Jack grins, waving to the woman as she walks over. “Mac, these are the folks who trained Mickey. Well, Maria’s one of them, anyway.”

“Hey, Jack. Good to see you.” She smiles. “How’d the puppy work out?”

“Ask Mac,” Jack says, pulling Mac forward a little. “Mickey’s his.”

“He’s great,” Mac says. “I love him. He’s...he’s helped a lot.” he doesn’t say more, he figures she’s heard a hundred stories so she’ll know what he means. 

“Good, I was hoping he’d have a good home. And I knew Jack would find him one.” Maria smiles. 

Mac bends down, rubbing his hands over the dog’s shoulders. The dog sniffs his cheek and leg where Mickey was licking and rubbing earlier. “Yeah, bud, you can smell a friend, can’t you? I don’t have him with me.” He looks up.  _ Dogs always make me feel better.  _ “This is Cody?”

“One of our most highly decorated agents. Practically one of a kind. If he were human, he'd be heading up his own division by now.” Maria smiles. “Heel, Cody.” 

Jack turns around as Riley and Desi walk up. “Hey, everybody, this is Maria. She's Cody's handler, and she and her brother run an organization that trains PTSD service animals in their spare time. Worthy introduced us years back, he knew her when she was with the K-9 unit at Bagram. He said her dogs saved a lot of lives. The bomb dogs...and the service ones.” 

Maria smiles. “Yeah, no arguments there. They were amazing. But none of them hold a candle to Cody. He's the best canine I've ever worked with.” 

“Really? He seems so chill,” Riley says. “He’s definitely a lot more laid back than Mickey.”

“Well, he’s eight, and Mickey is only two and a half, so that probably explains a lot,” Maria says with a smile. “ Cody, find it.” 

The dog’s ears perk up, and he stands up, trotting across the pier to the others. He goes for Desi first, and Mac wonders if there’s a residual smell of jerky or chips on her hands that makes her the most appealing target, as well as her guns. 

Maria walks over, glancing at where Cody is sniffing. “Ah, well, you're carrying on your right hip and your ankle.” Desi nods. Maria gives her dog a nod, and he rushes to Jack next, sniffing and barking. “And you, chest, right hip, right ankle. And...you’ve got a shoulder holster,” Maria says, when Cody darts over to Riley. 

“Hell of a sniffer he's got there,” Desi says, readjusting her coat to cover her gun again. 

Maria calls Cody back to her, where he sits down, panting slightly. “Cody's nose is so sensitive, he once tracked down a single revolver hidden in a crate of French roast from a hundred and fifty yards. All we have to do is walk through the terminal, he'll do the rest.”

They start off along the rows of shipping containers. “How’s Worthy these days?” Maria asks Jack.

“Good, his kid had to have surgery a while back, but he’s doing good now.”

“Heard something about a little mess in Honduras?” She says.

“Yeah, few months back, had to go down with the guys and pull him out.” Jack shakes his head. “But he’s alright.” 

“And it looks like you’re doing well for yourself.” 

“Can’t complain,” Jack says. “It’s a good job, and I got good kids here doing it with me.” He grins. 

“Glad to hear that,” Maria says. “You know, if you ever feel like trying a new career path, we always need fostering homes for our therapy dogs in training. After what you did with McClane, I was seriously considering offering you a job before you went to the CIA.”

“Hey, Mac, sound like a plan?” Jack asks. “Retire from Phoenix, spend all day with a bunch of puppies?”

Mac chuckles. “Sounds pretty good to me. Although I’m not sure who would be more destructive to the house if I was home all day, me or the dogs. How’d you get started training dogs like Mickey?” Mac asks. 

“When I came home from Afghanistan, I just couldn’t adjust,” Maria says softly. “I was living with my brother because I couldn’t hold down a job. Couldn’t even drive to work without flinching at every plastic bag on the side of the road, every empty soda bottle someone threw out.” She sighs. “And I missed my dogs. God, I just wanted to be back with them. I was scared for them, wanted to be there, even if I couldn't really protect them at all.” She looks down at Cody, then back to Mac. “And then one day Marco came home with two puppies. Turned out he’d been asking around, found out about a local shelter that was doing some work to start a PTSD therapy dog training with puppies they got. It gave me a reason to start getting up in the morning again. And...I knew every dog I trained could save a soldier’s life just like my bomb dogs. It wasn’t any less important. They were just helping in a different way.” 

Mac nods. He can’t imagine what he’d do without Mickey. Even if the dog  _ did  _ get duped this morning.  _ But I think Desi was right, Mickey realized she wasn’t here to hurt me. The second he picked up on my body language that she scared me, he got defensive. _ Mac is well aware dogs are good judges of character, and the rational part of his brain is reminding him that Desi definitely didn’t intend for them to meet with Mac woefully underdressed. 

_ She was trying to catch Jack. And she...didn’t make things more awkward, in fact, she didn’t even acknowledge that there was anything strange about the situation at all. _ Then again, she’s an experienced agent and Mac is well aware that there’s no personal space or privacy in this line of work. His team is kind enough to work with him and make sure he’s given as much consideration as possible, but the fact of the matter is that you can’t afford to be too shy as an agent. Which is probably the mentality Desi has.  _ I’m sure she’s seen co-workers in worse states of undress.  _

He glances at the woman walking in front next to Maria and her dog. Desi’s whole demeanor is one of professionalism, a far cry from the woman waving powdered donut pieces around on a fork in the kitchen just this morning.  _ She can turn herself into whatever she needs to be at any given time. _ Mac can see the tension in the way she carries herself, she’s ready to fight at a moment’s notice. 

Bozer’s voice in his ear is a welcome distraction from trying to figure out the enigma that is Desi Nguyen. “Three terminals down, two to go. And, uh, he may not say this out loud, but Cody's probably super bummed he didn't get to meet me. You know how much dogs love me.”

Mac grins. “Bozer's not kidding. As long as I've known him, dogs have loved him.”

Maria smiles. “Well, when this is over, we'll have to get the two of them together. And I’d love to see...Mickey, right? I’m sure I won’t even recognize him.” 

“Deal,” Bozer says.

Mac can hear Matty’s sigh. “Okay, if we're all done arranging a playdate for Bozer, can we actually focus on what we're doing here?”

“You got it, boss,” Jack says, stepping away from Mac for a moment to jog a few steps forward, up to Maria and Desi, probably to check in. Mac watches him leave, and suddenly feels irrationally panicky.  _ I’d rather stay with him. _ But then he feels Riley’s brush of an elbow against his arm, and he feels less nervous. If only for a moment. 

“So, what do you think of Desi?” Riley asks Mac. “You’ve been acting weird, ever since you and Jack showed up with her.”

“She’s...intense,” Mac says, trying not to betray how humiliated he still feels about the circumstances of their meeting. “She’s very focused.”

“Yeah, she doesn’t strike me as a people person,” Riley says. “But she’s Jack’s friend, and so I’m sure she’s great once you get to know her. Jack wouldn’t bring someone he didn’t trust and respect into the Phoenix.”

Mac just nods. He can tell something has set Riley on edge as well, this is her convincing herself things are fine.  _ She’s known me long enough to know when someone is making me uncomfortable. _ He appreciates her instinct to defend him.  _ Maybe I’ll let her have ‘big sister’ after all. _ Ever since Jack started the adoption process for Riley, Mac’s been telling her that since  _ he _ got adopted first, that should make him Jack’s oldest child. Riley insists otherwise, and Bozer is wise enough to remain an impartial observer. 

_ It’s fun, joking with her like that.  _ It reminds him of the way he watched the Bozers’ family interact. Boze and Jerry and Deja sometimes sounded like they were one insult shy of a bloody murder. It had scared Mac at first.  _ James meant it when he said angry things. _ It took a long time for him to learn that most of it was meant in jest. 

“All good back here?” Jack asks, slowing down again to meet back up with Mac and Riley.

“Yeah. Just...talking,” Mac says.

“Heard enough to know what about,” Jack says, and then must notice the matching looks of distress on Mac and Riley’s faces. “Nah, she didn’t hear you, she’s totally dialed in on the op. She...fixates.” Jack says. “If it’s not important to the op, she’s not going to waste time trying to pay attention.” 

Mac frowns. “She doesn’t sound anything like you.”

“Well, she’s not. In the field. Once the op’s over, she’s different,” Jack says. “And right now, I think she’s not herself. She’s trying to prove she was worth hiring. Something I think you both can understand.” 

Mac nods.  _ It’s a sucky feeling, thinking you have to make people want you. _ He’s gotten used to knowing that at least with Jack, he doesn’t have to earn belonging, although he still manages to forget that sometimes.  _ She’s just starting. I wasn’t much fun to be around when I started either. _

“Yeah, I’m willing to give her the benefit of the doubt for a couple weeks, let her settle in,” Riley says. 

“Me too,” Mac nods. “As long as she doesn’t pop up in the house out of nowhere again.” He tries to force a smile, turn it into a joke. 

“Yeah, that was not the best way for you two to meet,” Jack says. “I’m sorry, kiddo.”

“Not your fault.” Mac just wants to  _ forget _ . He hopes Desi will.  _ What a first impression. Is that what she’s going to see every time she looks at me?  _ He hopes not. 

“Well, it kinda was, seeing as she broke in to keep up with MY old bet.” 

Desi stops short, and Mac stops talking.  _ Maybe Jack was wrong, and she is listening, and she thinks I hate her. _ He doesn’t want that, doesn’t want to make things worse between them. 

But Desi isn’t even looking at him. She’s looking at Jack. “We've got zero visibility here.” She glances up at a nearby line of shipping crates. “I need to get up there for a better vantage.”

“Okay,” Jack says. 

Mac nods.  _ Maybe this is my chance to prove I’m useful.  _ “Well, uh, just hang around for a second, I'll build you a ladder.”

But Jack’s already bent down, cupping his hands into a stirrup. Desi takes a couple running steps, plants her boot in his hand, and uses the momentum as he tosses her upward to grab the top of the crate and throw herself onto it.

“Or you could just...do that,” Mac says, trying not to stare. Jack dusts his hands off and returns to the others as Desi looks down, grinning a little. 

“Thanks for the lift,” She calls, and then darts off across the top of the containers. 

“Did she just do that?” Bozer asks over comms.

“Yeah, she did.” Jack chuckles. 

Whatever he’s about to say next is cut off by Cody suddenly shifting his stance and snuffing sharply, then leaping forward. 

“Cody's got something,” Maria whispers. 

“Desi?” Jack calls. 

“Right behind you.” There’s the thud of boots on metal, as Desi follows them from her position on top of the crates. Cody is tugging the leash in earnest now, straining and panting. They turn down two rows and then the dog stops, whining and pawing at the outside of a shipping container.

Mac grabs a couple paperclips from his pocket and gets to work on the padlock on the door. 

“The guns must be in here,” Maria says. “Even I can smell the gun oil.”

Mac nods. It’s  _ strong, _ like when he’s sitting next to Jack while Jack cleans his gear in the evenings, out on the deck. He frowns.  _ I’ve run across a good number of smuggled gun shipments in my vigilante days, but I don’t remember them smelling so strongly.  _ Usually once the oil’s dried, the smell is barely detectable unless the crate of them is actually pried open. A shudder runs down the back of his spine, something feels wrong. 

The lock clicks open, and Mac unlatches the crate. All of them peer inside, and Mac can hear the startled whispers as the light hits the only thing inside.

“No guns. Not even gun parts,” Jack mutters. 

Maria nods. “Just gun oil heating up on a propane tank. That's what drew Cody.” She turns around, just as Bozer shouts something through comms at the same time Desi does. 

“You've got company!”

“Incoming!” Mac can hear Desi’s boots pounding metal through her comms. “Northwest corner, armed and coming in hot.”

“Yeah, you got at least guys with big guns,” Bozer says. “They were hiding in one of those shipping containers. I think when you opened yours, you triggered some kind of alert.” 

Jack and Riley reach for their own weapons. “We’ll go with Desi and buy you some time,” Jack says. “Get Maria and Cody out of here, okay Mac?”

He nods, watching Riley and Desi disappear behind the crates. “Okay, Maria, come on. Bozer, you’re gonna have to be our eyes in the sky, this place is a maze. Where should we go?”

“Take your next left,” Bozer says, confidently. “Jack! Riley! On your three o’clo...never mind, nice job Desi.” 

Mac can only imagine how stressed Bozer must be trying to help both groups of them at the same time, so he doesn’t complain at the back-and forth directions. “Right!” Bozer shouts suddenly, and Mac yanks Maria and a protesting Cody down a long alley.

“Boze, you sure? This is a dead end!” He shouts at the sight of crates and a forklift blocking the path ahead of them.

“Sorry, that was for Desi!” Bozer yells. “You were supposed to go straight.”

“Damn it,” Mac snaps. “Sorry, Boze, sorry, we’ll just backtrack…”

“No! Mac, don’t do that!” Bozer says. “You have guys coming down that way, if you go back to the end of that row they’ll see you for sure.”

Mac sighs, then looks behind him. “Maria. Hey, get behind the forklift now.” he reaches for the hem of his shirt and tears off a chunk, then runs over to one of the crates facing out and rubs the material over the hinges, smearing some grease on it. 

“Guys, more incoming,” Bozer hisses.

“Who?” Mac can hear Jack, Riley, and Desi all echoing his question. 

“All of you!” Bozer yells. “Mac, they’re on top of you, get to cover now! Wait, Desi, no...Desi!”

Mac grimaces and shuts off his comms. It’s too much, he can’t think with the chaos. And he has to be able to think or he and Maria are going to die, and he can’t let that happen. 

He dives behind the forklift just as four silhouettes move into the end of the alley and open fire. Bullets ricochet off the metal and Mac grimaces as sparks rain down on them, hoping he didn’t take a bullet anywhere.  _ Jack will kill me if I got shot again. _

“MacGyver?” Maria asks. “Are you okay?”

He nods, he thinks he is. She pulls her sidearm and reaches up over the side of the forklift, but only gets two shots off before she gasps in pain and pulls her hand back, minus the gun. 

“Maria, get down. You hit?” Mac asks.

“No, hit the gun, but it  _ hurts. _ ” She grabs her injured hand with the other one, momentarily letting go of Cody’s leash. The dog, already on edge from the gunfire, yelps as another round of shots rattles off the metal, and bolts down a space between the crates too small for humans to follow. His leash catches on the corner of a crate, but he jumps, tugs, and the collar snaps away.

“Cody!” Maria shouts. 

“We’ll get him after we stop these guys.” Mac rolls the shred of shirt he was holding into a long string and opens the forklift’s gas tank, shoving it in. 

“We're outgunned, Mac. How are we going to stop them?”

“You’ll see. Just start the engine to the forklift when I tell you to.” He takes off both shoelaces and ties one into a loop, then pulls Jack’s lucky lighter out of his pocket. Jack gave it to him after their ill-fated Vegas trip, saying Mac probably needs the luck more than Jack does.  _ He’s probably right. _ Mac just hopes it gets them out of this jam. 

“All right, fire it up.” Maria turns the key, and the engine roars. Mac wraps one shoelace around the controls and the other around the gas pedal, adjusting the loop so it holds the pedal down. The machine lumbers forward, forks scraping the sides of the containers and sparking. A moment later, it explodes.

Mac ducks, shielding Maria with his body, while the burning debris rains down around them. When the smoke clears, he hears shouts receding.  _ Guess they figured we were crazy enough to almost kill ourselves trying to hold them off, and they didn’t want to get mixed up in that. _

“Maria, are you alright?” He asks, pushing himself away from her, suddenly all too aware of and uncomfortable with the close physical contact. He grimaces as a burn on his calf makes itself known, something must have landed there.  _ Ouch. _

“I am, but we need to find Cody,” Maria says, struggling to her feet. “He's the toughest dog I've ever had, but any animal would panic if they got hit by sparks like that.”

Mac bites his lip, pulling himself upright. “We'll find him. I promise.”

* * *

Riley tries to focus on Bozer’s directions meant for her and Jack. It’s a bit difficult when he’s trying to move multiple people at once.  _ Maybe splitting up was a bad move. But it seemed like the best one at the time. _

“Jack! Riley! On your three o’clo…”

Riley turns, but she doesn’t have the chance to open fire on the two goons sneaking up on them, because Desi drops off the top of the nearest shipping container like a cat, practically pile driving the first guy into the ground, then turning and throwing the second one, who’s still in shock at being attacked from above, headfirst into the side of one of the crates. She turns to Jack, wiping some of her hair off her face. 

“Never mind, nice job Desi,” Bozer says. 

“Okay, point us to the next ones,” Desi says, and Riley can feel the need for a fight simmering in the words.  _ She’s got to be pissed about what happened that got her fired.  _

“Okay, well, there’s six up ahead, about to fan out.”

“Okay. Jack, you better get moving. I’m already two ahead.” She breaks into a run, and Jack follows. “I’ll leave you a couple, just to make you feel like you’re useful.”

“Oh, very funny!” Jack shouts back.  _ I can’t believe I’m basically watching the real life equivalent of Legolas and Gimli right now. _

Riley barely has a moment to think that before she rounds the corner behind Jack and sees Desi already taking on two guys at once. She grabs one’s jacket, pulls it half over his head, and slams his face into her knee, before grabbing the second one’s gun and twisting his arm. The man yells, and Jack slams a punch into his face.

“Hey, I had him!” Desi says, but she’s already turning to face the next guy. “Get your own!”

“I plan to!” Jack grabs a big, burly guy, then bends down and throws him over his shoulder, slamming him hard on his back before laying him out cold and turning around. 

Riley’s trying to figure out her best move. Jack and Desi are moving so much in sync she’s afraid to break into the rhythm and throw them off. Even though she’s been Jack’s partner for the better part of a decade, there’s something about watching these two that makes her appreciate their shared skill set. Riley’s perfectly capable of holding her own in a fistfight, but this is beyond capability. It’s...talent.

She watches Jack take down another guy while Desi tangles with the...fifth.  _ Six, Bozer said six. Where is... _ Her hand flies to her gun just as Bozer yells. “Desi! Look out!” 

There’s a sudden bang, and Desi flies backward, slamming into one of the cargo containers. Riley doesn’t hesitate. She takes aim and fires at the man with the shotgun who’s just appeared around a corner of one of the crates.

Jack actually  _ snarls _ , taking down the last man with such a brutal kick to the knee Riley hears bone snap, and grimaces. Jack leaves the man groaning on the ground and rushes over to Desi, skidding to his knees beside her in the dirt. “Desi! Desi!” 

She blinks up at him, grimacing.“Hey.”

“You okay?” Riley asks.

Desi nods, wincing as she pushes herself to sitting. “Kevlar is a girl's best friend.” She pulls aside the tattered front of her shirt to show the vest underneath. “Damn it. I would have had that last guy if that killjoy didn’t decide to shoot me.” 

“My count, I have four, you three, Riley one,” Jack says with a chuckle.

“Only because you stole two of mine.” Desi says, gasping as she stands up leaning on the shipping container. She rubs her injured shoulder with a grimace. “Guys, what the hell just happened?”

Riley hears Mac through the comms and breathes a sigh of relief. “The tip Maria got was fake. The smugglers lured us into a trap and they tried to kill us.”

“Actually, I don't think we were their main target,” Jack says. “I found a paper in one of these dirtbags’ jackets.” 

“So we weren't the target?” Riley hears Maria ask.

“No,” Desi says, glancing at the paper with a quizzical frown. “The  _ dog _ was.” 

“Our satellite shows Cody heading east, but this footage loses him the second he hits the trees,” Bozer says. “You guys need to regroup at the east side of the dockyard, and go from there.” 

“These guys went through all that trouble just to lure out and kill a dog?” Desi asks when they finally find Mac and Maria already at the edge of the woods on the outskirts of the shipping yard. 

Maria shakes her head as they plunge into the undergrowth. “Not just any dog. Cody's stopped more illegal shipments of guns than all other ATF dogs combined. If they take him out, they'll increase the number of weapons that get through tenfold.”

“Which means they won't give up until they get him,” Jack says. “We have to find Cody before they do.”

“What's the protocol for finding a lost working dog?” Riley asks. 

Maria sighs. “Same as finding any other lost dog. When they panic, they get scared and disoriented and bolt.”

“So you can't just, like, throw up a bat signal and he'll come back?” Desi asks. 

That draws a weak smile from Maria.  _ Guess she and Jack have the same method of trying to fix a situation with a little humor.  _ “Sadly, no. His microchip won't help unless he's found and scanned, but...maybe I can call him back with this whistle.” She pats her chest, then looks up, face stricken. “Damn it, I must've lost it during the firefight at the port.”

“Well, I guess we’re doing this the old-fashioned way,” Jack says, then starts shouting at the top of his lungs. “Cody! Cody!”

“Aren’t you afraid the bad guys are going to hear us?” Riley asks. 

“I mean, if there’s any more out there, they might,” Jack shrugs. “But if they come, I’m ready. Besides, Desi still needs to redeem herself.”

“Hey!” Desi says. “I had the first guy, so technically we’re tied.” 

Riley shakes her head, turning away, but before she can raise her hands to her mouth to start calling, she sees something in the dirt. “Hey, look,” Riley says. “Right there.”

Jack bends down next to the marks. “Yeah, those tracks are fresh. He definitely came through this way.”

“Cody!” Their voices echo off the trees, but Riley doesn’t hear any response aside from some squirrels skittering away in the leaves, and birds flapping, disturbed. Nothing big enough to be the dog or the smugglers. 

“He must be too far away to hear our voices or too scared to respond,” Maria says. “I need my whistle.” 

Mac frowns, glancing around at the ground, before reaching down for a stick. “Actually, I think I can make one. I just need this and a, uh, plastic bag about yea big.” He holds out his hands. 

“You got it,” Riley says. “We’ll go find you a bag.”

Jack nods, and he, Desi, and Riley all walk off in separate directions while Mac sits down on a fallen log and starts carving at the stick with his knife. 

Riley kicks through the leaves for a few minutes, before she spots something out of place. A large metal barrel, like the kind chemicals come in. She approaches slowly, before realizing it’s a forest trail garbage can. 

_ Well, this is as good a spot as any to start looking.  _ She wishes she had a pair of gloves. She digs around through some granola bar wrappers, empty water bottles, and a couple dog cleanup bags before finding a grimy grocery sack that must have blown into the woods, been picked up by a conscientious hiker, and then thrown away here. 

She turns around, to head back to Mac, when she hears something rustling in the leaves. The particular sound of a footstep tread, and even more telling, one that’s actively attempting to mask itself by rolling the sole over the ground. 

Someone is moving, nearby. Riley pulls her gun, shoving the bag in her pocket. She doesn’t want to shoot a random hiker, but she also doesn’t want to be taken by surprise by the smugglers. 

The next second, she sees the person through the trees, and holsters her gun with a sigh. It’s Desi. 

“Damn it, Desi, you scared me.” Riley says as the other agent walks up.

“I’m not surprised, you were making enough noise out here to draw the whole smuggling ring down on your position,” Desi says, shaking her head. “Jack’s slipping, if he didn’t teach you basic woodcraft.”

“I was in a hurry,” Riley says, but already knows it was no excuse.

Desi just raises an eyebrow. “I hope you at least found something worth making a racket like a herd of elephants for.”

Riley grins and pulls out the plastic bag. “Sure did. How about you?”

“Well, I found plenty of some...pretty disgusting litter, but no bags,” Desi says, grimacing. “The beer cans and condom wrappers kind of told me everything I didn’t want to know about that campsite.” She shudders and rubs her hands on her jeans.

“Yuck,” Riley says. “Suddenly I feel much better about digging through a trash can.” 

As they get closer to where they left Mac and Maria, Riley can hear an entirely different noise giving away their position. It sounds like Mac and Jack are having another one of their mostly-fake arguments. 

“You said a bag, dude. You should have been more specific.” 

“Well, I figured it would be kind of obvious I needed one without a hole,” Mac says.

“To you, yes. To us, not so much.” Jack says. “Okay, fine I’ll go back and look again. But do you know how hard it is to find these things intact in the wild? I can barely get them to stay together coming home from the store.” 

“That’s because you pack things in them until they literally can’t hold any more.” Mac shakes his head.

“Okay, I’m going.”

“Wait, Jack,” Riley says, stepping out of the trees. “I found one too, Mac, you want to look it over before Jack goes hunting again?” Mac nods. Riley pulls the bag out of her pocket and hands it over. “Here you go. One nasty bag...straight from the garbage.” Riley elects to avoid telling him about what Desi found.  _ Hopefully she won’t say anything either. _

“Thank you.” Mac takes the bag and glances at it. “No holes.” He looks at Jack. “Sorry, hers wins.”

“What do you even need a bag for?” Jack asks.

“It acts as a bellows, and increases the amount and force of the air I’m pushing through the whistle, making it louder,” Mac says. “Like the difference between a recorder and a bagpipe.”

“Of course you’d compare it to a bagpipe,  _ Angus _ ,” Jack chuckles. 

“I was attempting to illustrate the concept, it had nothing to do specifically with Scotland,” Mac replies. 

“I still think we should go back there. We never really got to do sightseeing, thanks to that mad scientist lady and her thief pal.”

“I did all the sightseeing I wanted to,” Mac says, still doing something to the whistle. “You in a kilt  _ once _ was enough for a lifetime.”

“Wait, Jack wore a  _ kilt?” _ Desi asks. “And didn’t bother to share this incredibly vital information with me?”

“Oh yes, and I have photographic proof,” Riley chuckles. “Remind me to share when this is over.” She glances at Desi.  _ She confuses me. She was absolutely laser focused back at the docks, but clearly she’s able to relax enough to joke about Jack. _ Riley wonders if it’s their shared past that brings out that side of her, or just the less threatening nature of the situation right now. 

_ I guess it makes sense she gets wound tight easily. She just got back from that long cover. _ Riley’s used to being around agents who spend more time able to relax. _ She had to be on her guard twenty-four seven. Never herself, if she wanted to survive. No wonder she isn’t finding it easy to dial that down. _ Riley’s actually surprised, now that she’s considering the facts, that Desi can relax enough to joke at all. 

_ I should give her some leash, at least for a while. It’s got to be a tough adjustment, trying to be normal again after that.  _ She remembers what Matty had said about Ethan, that his cover life could have made him a very different person.  _ And it did. I wonder how much of Desi is still the woman Jack remembers? _

She has to admit the thought had crossed her mind before, while talking to Mac in the freight yard.  _ Jack said he’d vouch for her, but he was vouching for the person he knew years ago. This Desi might be someone totally different.  _

But in the moments in between, Riley sees someone she knows Jack would have gotten along with. Someone capable of matching his banter, of dealing with the shitty situations by making jokes and trying to lighten the mood.  _ They’re playing off each other, even if just a little, right now. _ She’s not sure  _ exactly  _ what happened at the house earlier, with Mac, and she’s not quite willing to let her guard down, but she thinks it’s possible Desi might fit into the team after all. 

“Okay, it’s done. Maria, do you have a special call you use?” Mac asks. 

“He's trained to respond to three short blasts. About the same as a Morse Code “S”.” 

Mac nods, then squeezes the bag three times, quickly. 

“Uh, I know only dogs can hear that frequency, but that was still pretty anticlimactic,” Desi says. 

“Yeah, uh, we sure it actually worked?” Riley asks. 

Mac sighs, rolling his shoulders as if he’s tired. “No, I'm not. Because hollowing out the inside of a stick isn't the recommended method for making a dog whistle.”

“Well, it’s all we’ve got. Try it again, Mac.” 

Mac does, and then Riley hears a faint barking sound echoing. 

“That's got to be Cody!” Maria says. 

“It's coming from that direction,” Jack says, pointing forward and to the left. “Let’s hurry. Mac, keep playing the bagpipes, maybe he’ll come to us.” 

Mac groans, but squeezes the bag again. “Okay, let’s go.” 

Riley picks her way through the weeds along the trail. Desi is back to her hyperalert self, and Jack is still needling Mac about bagpipes and kilts and his name.  _ Of course he is. _ She can tell Mac is still shaken by whatever happened with Desi this morning. Jack is trying to annoy him into distraction. 

It seems to be working. At least until Mac’s plastic bag tears and he drops the whole contraption with a sigh. “Well, if he hasn’t come to us yet, maybe he can’t.”

“You think Cody’s hurt?” Maria asks, her voice worried.

“I think he’d be barking louder if he was. In fact, I haven’t heard him bark at all lately,” Mac says. “He could be trapped somewhere, maybe got inside a building and can’t get out.”

“Guys, your comm signals are showing you’re coming to a road,” Bozer says. “There’s still a lot of tree cover, but there’s a small parking lot for the trailhead, and there’s something moving down there, something brown.”

“That must be him!” Maria says. “Come on!”

Riley picks up her pace, plunging through the dead leaves and low growing plants. She hears Jack curse and mutter something about a twisted ankle, but when she turns around to look, he’s still keeping up the pace. 

“You okay?” She asks.

“Fine. Just stepped in a hole,” Jack says, but she can see the grimace of pain and the tight lines around his eyes and mouth.  _ Not broken, but probably a sprain. Damn it. _

The five of them finally plunge out of the trees into a small dirt-and-gravel lot with several cars parked in it. 

“Cody!” Maria calls, but the dog that stumbles out from behind a grey minivan is definitely not Cody. 

“That’s not our dog,” Riley says, it’s a bit obvious but she can’t help voicing the disappointment she’s sure the entire team is feeling. The mournful-eyed basset waddles up to them, whining. His droopy ears are matted with dirt and burrs, and his skin looks too loose to be healthy. 

“No, it is not,” Jack says. “We’ve been following the wrong bark. Or barking up the wrong tree.” He shrugs. “Something like that.” 

Desi holds out a chunk of jerky from her pocket. “Come here, buddy.” The basset slowly reaches out his droopy-skinned muzzle for the piece of meat, then grabs it from Desi’s hand. He retreats a few shaky steps, gulping down the chunk of food ravenously.

“Hey, guys, look at this,” Mac says, bending down beside the road. Riley walks over to where he’s kneeling in the mud, pointing. “These look like Cody’s prints.”

“They’re the right size,” Maria says. 

“They go to the road and stop,” Mac says.

“You don’t think…” Riley trails off.

“If he was hit I think we’d...uh...see some evidence of that,” Mac mumbles. “No, look, here? These footprints come to his tracks, then go back beside them, until we reach  _ these _ tire tracks.” He stands up, brushing his hands on his pants. “I think someone picked Cody up and got him into their car.” He snaps a picture of the tread on his phone. “Hey Bozer, I’m gonna send you a picture of the tires from the car we think Cody was taken away in.” He holds up the phone. “Hope we have enough signal out here to send it.”

“I got it,” Bozer says. “Running it through the databases now...Uh. Bad news, Mac. The tracks you found belong to a tire that comes stock on over half the SUVs and vans on the road. And sifting through every local match for any persons of interest will take hours.”

Jack nods. “Time we don't have. Whether Cody was snatched up by smugglers, or some family looking for a new pet, they could be driving further away every second. Mac, tell me you've come up with a plan to find Cody.”

“Yep, I got a plan, but it's pretty crazy,” Mac says, looking around and then starting to walk down the line of parked cars. 

“You say that like it's unusual,” Riley chuckles. “How 'bout you just tell us what you need so we can help you, instead of blindly following you around?”  _ He’s getting lost in his head a lot today. _ She wants desperately to know more, so she can help, but the truth is, she might not be able to help him at all.  _ What could Desi possibly have done to put him so on edge? _ If the new team member was a man, she’d understand it more, Mac has good reason to be wary around unknown men. But he’d never seemed to have a real issue with her or Cage or Leanna, aside from Cage’s Jedi mind trick moments.  _ Maybe it’s just that she’s so intense.  _ Or maybe he feels like his closeness with Jack is being threatened by Jack’s old CIA partner coming back. _ I mean, I felt that way when Jack first started taking Mac under his wing.  _

“Okay, well, I'm looking for a car that I can hotwire, 'cause it's old enough to hotwire, but I also need a sunroof on it.”

“Okay, that's oddly specific. Why?” Desi asks. 

“Well, it's just like Maria said: every law-enforcement dog has an RFID chip implanted in their necks, which is the same put in house pets to ID them if they get lost. And I'm gonna use Cody's to track him down.”

“But how? You have to be right next to the chip to search it,” Riley says. 

“Got one,” Jack says, pointing to a rather battered pickup truck. “Mac, will this one work?”

“Yep. And ordinarily, yes, Riley, you’re right. The chip that's under Cody's skin is passive, which means It has no battery. So it only broadcasts the data stored on it when it's activated by electromagnetic radio waves.”

“Like the ones put out by an RFID reader,” Desi says. Riley turns toward her with a raised eyebrow. Desi shrugs. “University of Michigan, Criminal Justice and Electrical Engineering. Go Blue,” she says cheerfully. “I’m not just the muscle, contrary to popular belief. But Maria's right. We're only gonna be able to find Cody's RFID tag if we're basically standing right on top of him.”

“Maybe we can scan it from a distance if I can build a very powerful detector,” Mac says. He’s doing that thing where he spins and glances around him, Riley’s noticed it more since they got him back from Murdoc. Like the way he taps his fingers on his legs when he’s trying to focus.  _ I wonder if James forced him to stop all that, before. _ She’s glad Mac feels comfortable enough around them to continue doing these things. “I couldn't in the woods, but now I have parts to source,” He says, and there’s that little smile on his face that Riley knows very well. 

“Like this truck we're about to steal,” Desi says. 

“Yeah. And, uh, we're also gonna have to take over an AM radio station,” Mac says as he pops open the truck door and reaches under the dashboard. 

“AM radio. Is that even still a thing?” Bozer asks.

“Yes, it is, Bozer,” Mac says with a chuckle, then jumps, banging his head on the steering wheel. “Who touched my ankle...oh.” The basset hound is snuffling Mac’s shoe. He lifts his head and whines. 

“Sorry, little dude, I don’t have any more food on me,” Desi says. “Except a granola bar with chocolate chips, which you can’t have.” She frowns regretfully. “Poor little guy. MacGyver, if he had a microchip tag, your machine could turn it on and read it, right?”

“Well, yeah, but I haven’t built it yet,” Mac says as the truck starts with a coughing hum. “I still need a lot more parts.”

“We could take him along and scan him when we get it running. We can’t just leave him here,” Riley says.

Jack sighs. “Then put him in the car, kids. Let’s go.” 

* * *

A.M. RADIO STATION

YES, THEY’RE STILL AROUND

Riley steps out of the radio station’s squat little cinderblock building, slinging her backpack back over her shoulders. “Guess how much it costs to buy up all the airtime on Eureka 1600, California's hottest daytime AM channel.”

Jack shrugs, Mac spreads his hands.

“No takers?” Riley asks. “A whopping two-hundred bucks. At the top of the hour, DJ something or other will start broadcasting the RFID frequency for the rest of the day.”

“Just one dull, monotonous sound,” Desi says. “Not unlike their current playlist of adult contemporary.”

“Hey, I like adult contemporary,” Bozer insists over comms. Jack chuckles.  _ Oh Bozer.  _ It’s nice to have someone else on the team who lightens the mood with humor every once in a while.  _ Takes some of the pressure off me. Hey, if the job was easy, everyone would do it. _

“And dogs can hear this sound?” Jack asks, more to keep Mac’s mind occupied than anything.  _ I can tell he’s still shaken from this morning. And I don’t blame him. _ It’s not really fair to blame Desi, either, she didn’t know a thing about Mac’s trauma. But Jack can’t help but be a little irritated. 

Mac shakes his head. “Well, no, but the tone should activate every RFID tag within 100 miles, including the one in Cody. And then, once it is activated, we'll be able to use this high-powered detector to look for him.”

“Wait, you said every RFID tag within 100 miles?” Riley asks. 

“Yeah.”

“That's gonna be a lot,” Riley says, hands already reaching to pull her computer out of her backpack. 

“Thousands and thousands. Way more than any  _ human  _ could ever scan through,” Mac says with a grin.

“Say no more.” Riley pulls out her rig. “I’m on it.” 

“How we lookin’ there, bud?” Jack asks. 

“We are...ready to go.” Mac hops down and climbs in the back of the truck near where he’s got his makeshift broadcasting system hooked up. 

“I’ll drive,” Desi says, holding out her hand for the keys.

“I’m good,” Jack insists. 

“Don’t lie to me, your ankle’s killing you. Has been since we got to that parking lot. You’re just too stubborn to admit it. I’ll let you ride shotgun if you’re so worried about getting carsick.”

“Carsick?” Riley asks.

Jack groans. “Damn it, Dez, that was one time. And I was bleeding out, I’d been drugged, and you were driving like a bat outta hell.” 

“Because you were bleeding out!” Desi argues. “If I’d gone any slower we’d have missed exfil, and it wasn’t exactly like we could just go find a clinic in the middle of the Siberian tundra.”

“How many ops did you two run together?” Riley asks. 

“Twenty-three after we graduated the Farm. Then we both got hand-picked for new assignments.” Jack glances at Desi. “But they were all pretty memorable. Our fault for graduating top of the class, I guess.”  _ They threw us in the deep end from the very start.  _ Jack was given a few separate missions when he first graduated, thanks to his level of experience and his military background, but he’d been paired back with Desi for a memorable three months before they got split up again. And then he got the Fly-by-Night cover, and met Sarah… And Desi dropped off the map in long term covers. 

He never expected to be working with her again. But here they are. She’s changed, and Jack hates seeing the haunted stare that invades her eyes when she’s not bantering with him or focusing on the mission. It happens to them all sooner or later in this job, he sees it in both his kids sometimes and it crushes his heart. But it’s almost worse in Desi, because when he met her no one had broken her yet. That innocent enthusiasm had driven him to take her under his wing like a little sister. And now she’s been hurt, and betrayed, and if the scars he saw on her arms and on her side under the cropped hem of her t-shirt are any indication, tortured as well. He knows she’s strong. But it still hurts to see.  _ The biggest liability I’ve ever had as a field agent is not wanting to see anyone but me get hurt. _

Desi climbs in the driver’s seat and starts the truck. “Get in or get left behind!” She calls, and just like that, the thoughts of what she’s been through, alone, fall away, and it’s time to focus on the mission at hand again. Jack climbs in the passenger seat, hand on his sidearm, just in case. “Okay, Mac, ready to rock and roll?”

“Yes, we are. In three, two...and we’re live.” 

“Okay, ladies and gentlemen, for your listening pleasure, we have a back to back soundtrack of The Lost Dogs’ greatest hits,” Desi chuckles. “If you’re out there listening to us, Cody Ramirez, this one’s for you.” 

“You weren't kidding, Mac,” Riley says. “This thing is giving us hits on every chipped dog, cat, and bird in the area. Not to mention we're getting hits on clothing stores, grocery stores and security badges.”

“Well, good,” Mac says, turning the satellite dish he’s rigged up to the truck’s electrical system slightly. “Now that we know it works, filter out all search results that don't match Cody's info.”

You got it.

“No sign of Cody yet. And it looks like our new friend doesn’t have a chip,” Riley says. “Honestly, the fact that he doesn’t have a chip or a collar, and the fact that I uploaded his photo to scan and haven’t found any posts anywhere looking for a lost basset hound with his appearance? I think someone dumped him.”

“Who would be heartless enough to look at a face like that and drive away?” Desi asks. 

Jack shrugs, eyes still on the road. “All the things you’ve seen, and you get philosophical about people who abandoned a dog?”

Desi shrugs. “It just seems like a pretty shitty thing to do, take something that was depending on you and throw it away like that.” 

“Yeah, it is.” Jack can feel the muscle in his jaw twitching the way it does whenever he thinks of James MacGyver.  _ I ask myself all the time how that man could have looked at Mac’s innocent, trusting eyes and walked away. Sometimes I think he’s more of a psychopath than Murdoc.  _

He knows if he told Desi the truth about Mac, she’d forgive any of the frostiness between them and probably become almost as fiercely protective as Jack is. But that’s not Jack’s place to speak up. If Mac wants Desi to know about his past, he’s going to have to tell her himself. And if he wants to keep it hidden, Jack can respect that. 

“We got Cody!” Riley says. She hands her rig up to Jack to show the location. 

“All right, yeah. Just keep heading north…” Jack is slammed backward in his seat as Desi mashes down the accelerator. “I was gonna say step on it, but you read my mind.”

“And I thought Jack drove fast,” Riley says from the back seat. “I’m beginning to see what the whole carsick thing was about.”

“Hey, you want to save Cody or not?” Desi asks. 

“Yeah. But that requires us being alive to do it,” Mac says, and Jack recognizes the humor that takes the sting out of his words. Jack glances at Mac in the rearview.  _ At least if he’s joking he’s feeling better about her now. Right? _

* * *

RANDOM NEIGHBORHOOD

THIS HOUSE LOOKS PRETTY NORMAL

“Okay, according to what I dug up on the internet, this place belongs to a cookie cutter suburban family, the Allens.” Riley says. “Far as I can tell, there’s no connection to the smugglers. Paper trails on husband and wife are both coming up clean.”

“Yeah, well, keep your guard up. Remember, we have no idea why they took Cody,” Desi says, stepping out of the truck. 

Riley deposits her rig in her backpack and climbs out. She follows the others around to the back of the house, where they step carefully up onto the porch. 

A dog barks somewhere inside. 

“Cody,” Maria whispers. “He doesn't sound happy.”

Desi rests her sidearm against her leg with a scowl. “I don’t pull my gun unless I have to. But just know I make special exceptions for anyone who hurts animals.” She pulls back and dropkicks the door off its hinges, storming into the house. 

Mac blinks. “She's intense.”

“You're just figuring that out?” Jack asks, following Desi through the ruined door, and into the absolute chaos inside.

A man, a woman, and two kids are clustered around the dog in the middle of the living room. Cody looks somewhere between pissed off and mortified, there’s a pink fluffy scarf around his neck, some sort of child’s pretend chef’s hat on his head, and a bow tied on his tail. 

The second Maria comes through the door, he leaps off the couch and runs to her, whining and wagging his tail, sending bow and hat and scarf flying.

“What the hell?!” The man who was standing in the room yells, looking from Desi and her gun to the ruined door and the veritable army pouring in through it. “Who are you people?”

“Cody!” Maria says. “You’re okay, here, good boy, sit.” She clips a thin collar around his neck, Riley guesses it’s some sort of backup in case his normal one snaps.

Desi holsters her gun. “Sorry about your door, but that dog belongs to the ATF. Where did you find him?”

Mr. Allen is still staring, and his wife has pushed both her kids behind her protectively. Finally, the man steps forward, hands still raised. “I was on my morning hike when he just ran up to me. He looked lost, had no collar. Figured I shouldn't leave him out there.”

“Thank you,” Maria says, standing up with Cody’s leash in her hand. “He really had us worried.” 

“Yeah. Thank you,” Riley says. “And sorry again for the whole kicking in your door thing. But the ATF will reimburse you.”

“I'm just glad you saw our post,” Mrs. Allen says. 

“What post?” Riley asks, and the first fingers of ice slip into her blood, the ones telling her this mission isn’t even close to over. That things are about to get much, much worse. 

“Online. We were gonna put out fliers, too, but you sent us an e-mail within 20 minutes of us posting his cute little photo on the neighborhood site, so…”

“We never e-mailed you,” Jack says. 

“Then who did?” 

“All right, guys, we gotta move, now! Come on,” Desi says. “All of you, get in your car, this place isn’t safe.”

“What?”

“Too late, guys,” Mac says. “Look.” He pulls a curtain aside, and out the window, Riley can see two big trucks pulling in. “Let’s go out the…”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Guys, we got a problem. There's more in the back,” Desi says, looking up. “If we try to go out that way we’re gonna get made.”

Mac points to where two men are getting out of the trucks out front and coming up the walkway to the house. “Desi, Jack, did those guys see you at the port?”

Desi shakes her head with a frown. “No, those are different guys. Why?”

* * *

SUBURBIA

DEFINITELY NOT DESI’S DREAM HOUSE

Jack raises his eyebrows as the doorbell rings. “You want to get it, or should I,  _ honey?” _

“I’ll take care of it,  _ babe. _ ” She walks up to the door and unlocks it, pulling it open slightly to look up at the two men waiting on the steps. “Hi. How can I help you?” Desi asks, schooling her features into the completely unflustered expression.  _ The average housewife doesn’t expect to be approached by gun runners. So don’t give away the tension. _ “Oh, that's right, you're here for your dog. I'm Jennifer, this is my husband George.” Desi grips Jack’s arm with a wide false smile, pulling him forward. 

“Do you still have him?” The taller of the two men asks. 

“Of course. Come on in,” Jack says, holding the door open a little wider. Desi can tell he’s looking past these guys, tracking how many others are outside in the cars. 

“Your dog is such a sweetheart,” Desi says, leading the men into the hallway. “My daughter's so bummed we can't keep him.”

“Where is he?” One of the men asks, and his hand moves to the very poorly concealed sidearm under his jacket.  _ I could have that out and turned on him in two seconds. _ But there are more men outside and she can’t be sure the rest of the team is in position yet, so she pretends she doesn’t notice. 

“We put him in the tub. He was just so muddy from the trail. Figured we'd give him a quick bath,” She says with what she hopes is a benign chuckle. “This way.”

She can hear chatter from the comms still in her ear, turned far down so that the feedback from them shouldn’t be audible to the smugglers. “How we doing, Maria?” MacGyver asks, his own voice distorted by the echo of tile in the bathroom, and the sound of running water. There’s a splash and a muffled sound, and she closes her eyes briefly.  _ God I hope he didn’t just slip on wet tile or fall into the tub.  _

“Loaded and ready to go,” Maria says, cutting off Desi’s concerns. “How are you and Riley doing?”

“Almost there,” MacGyver says. “Jack, Desi, can you buy us a couple more minutes?”

Desi scrambles to do just that, turning toward the kitchen instead of down the hall to the bathroom. “Where are my manners? I didn't even offer you guys a glass of water.” She reaches up for the cupboard, hoping it’s the one that actually has the glasses in it.  _ I’ll blow our whole cover by not knowing where things are in ‘my’ house. _ Maybe she can say they just moved in...

Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Davis and MacGyver slip past and head for the broken rear door. She glances back at the men, who are both frowning. 

“We're in a hurry, so if you just take us to our dog-”

She nods and closes the cupboard. “Sure. No problem. Just figured you might be thirsty. That's all.”

Now that she knows the rest of the team is out of the house, she walks rapidly to the bathroom and knocks on the door. 

“Kelly, time to dry off the dog,” she yells over the sound of the water. “The owners are here.”

The man who reached for his gun earlier shifts slightly. “If he's still a little wet, it's fine. We just really want to see him and make sure he's okay.”

“Totally get it. Let me just check.” She opens the door slightly, and both men push past her.

“He's not in-” One of them shouts, only to be cut off as Desi’s boot slams into his chin. He falls backward, tangling in the shower curtain and tumbling into the tub. Desi turns, but the elbow she flings out to smash into the second man is caught in an iron grip and she’s shoved backward. She stumbles, slamming her back into the sink and her head snapping back to hit the mirror behind her. Glass shatters and tinkles. 

She grabs the edges of the sink and starts to use the momentum to push herself back into the fight, but it’s already over. Jack is spinning her assailant around, slamming him against the wall, and then shoving him to the floor.

Desi rakes a hand through her hair, letting shards of glass fall free and crash to the tile. “Nice work, Jack.”

Jack tightens the zipties around the man’s wrists and stands up. “I’m still winning.” 

Desi rolls her eyes. “Not for long, Dalton.” 

Jack chuckles and shoves her shoulder a little. “Keep dreaming.” 

She has to admit, she missed this. Not specifically working with Dalton, (yes, she missed that too, but he never needs to hear it from her unless she’s literally dying), but having a team. People who genuinely have her back. People she isn’t forced to trust for the job, who will defend a false version of her but turn that same fury on her the moment she lets her guard down and lets the truth slip.  _ Working with terrorists and criminals, you get used to knowing your back is covered as long as you’re one of them. As long as you still fit in. _ Here, no matter what they’ve argued about, no matter what she did that was putting Jack on edge earlier, he’ll defend her with his life, if necessary. 

And then there’s yelling and the sound of vehicles crashing from outside, and Desi sighs.  _ Of course, it could never be this easy.  _

* * *

FIVE MINUTES EARLIER

Mac jumps, barely catching himself on the damp porcelain edge of the tub, when Riley opens the door and holds out a hair dryer and a curling iron. “Will these work?” She shrugs. “This is all they had, so you gotta make it work.”

“Then I will.” Mac works feverishly, listening to Desi and Jack play suburban couple in his comms while he does.  _ They won’t be able to stall these guys forever. I need to move fast. _ He glances up momentarily at Riley. “Okay, when this is done, I need you to stick it as close to the alternator as possible. It needs to interfere with the electric charge.”

Mac finishes and hands the converted curling iron to Riley, it’s the smaller and probably less likely to accidentally shock her one. “All right, Maria. Wait for my signal.”

He and Riley creep down the hall, past the kitchen where Jack and Desi are stalling the smugglers, and hurry out the broken back door, crouching low to stay out of the view of the men in the car on the street behind them. Mac heads for one of the trucks while Riley goes to the other, and he shoves his contraption up into the wheel well, hoping it’s powerful enough to do what he needs it to. Otherwise he’s going to be sending Maria directly into a trap. 

He hears the crashes through his comms as Desi and Jack take out the men inside.  _ We can’t wait any longer, these guys will get suspicious as to why the ones who went in haven’t come back with Cody. _

Mac rolls away from the truck and ducks behind a bush, watching Riley do the same. “Maria, go,” He whispers.

The next second, there’s a loud crash as the family’s SUV pulls out of the garage without opening the door. The door catches on the top momentarily, but then falls off, and the vehicle fishtails and screeches off down the street. 

Mac hears the trucks trying to turn over, but his disruptors have done what they’re supposed to. The engines cough and remain useless. 

Both drivers seem to realize that simultaneously, and jump out of the cars and run toward the truck Desi parked a few doors down, clearly intending to steal that and take off after the SUV.  _ Oh no you don’t. _ Mac and Riley both jump up, running after the men. Riley takes her guy out with an efficient leg sweep and left hook, and Mac manages to catch his guy by the neck, throwing him to the ground and pinning him there, keeping a grip on his neck until the man passes out.

Riley reaches down to help him to his feet. “Nice sleeper hold.”

“Thanks. Jack made me practice until I could  _ do them _ in my sleep.” Mac rolls his shoulders, turning around to see if Jack and Desi are coming out...and winces at the sound of a terrible rending crash. The kind made by metal on metal, like cars colliding…

He turns all the way around and glances down the street to where the Allen family’s SUV has been t-boned by a large delivery-style van.  _ The guys from the other street behind the house. They heard the commotion and cut Maria off.  _

He starts to run toward the wreck, watching helplessly as the van’s side door slides open, and Maria and Cody are yanked out of the wrecked car and pulled inside. 

“Guys, what the hell is happening?” Bozer yells. “I can’t see anything, we don’t have sattelites! Is everyone okay?” 

“Uh, no, Boze.” Mac skids to a stop beside the SUV, where the dazed Allen family members are climbing out. “The Allens are alright but the smugglers hit their car and then grabbed Maria and Cody.” Mac leans back on the wrecked car as Jack and Desi rush up, panting. Desi has blood on her cheek, a long, thin slice, and Jack’s knuckles are bruised. Riley bends down, reassuring the Allen kids and checking them over for injury. Mac glances from the car to the road the van took, still listening to Bozer over comms. 

“What? What do you mean, got away with Maria and Cody? I thought they were trying to kill Cody.”

“Well, we must have been wrong. They clearly wanted to capture him since I saw them using a control stick.” Mac sighs. 

“But why?” Bozer asks. “Are gun-sniffing dogs a hot commodity on the black market?”

“Good question.” Mac turns to Jack. “Do you think someone would want to steal a dog like that?”

Jack frowns. “Maybe, but they’d be almost useless without a handler who knew how to control them, which is probably why they have Maria. The question is, why would someone who’s smuggling guns already want a dog who could find them?”

“Smoke out competition?” Desi asks. “Stealing rival shipments?”

“Could be,” Mac says. “Bozer, we still don’t have eyes in the sky?”

“No, I couldn't task a satellite to your location fast enough.”

“Do we need a satellite? Couldn't we just find Cody again using Mac's fancy RFID tracker?” Riley asks. 

“Yeah, we could. But there's a quicker way,” Mac says, turning to Mr. Allen. The man looks stunned, but unharmed aside from a bruise on his jaw. “You guys said that those men responded to your lost dog post by e-mail, right?” 

“Uh-huh.”

“Can you track him using the e-mail?” Mac asks Riley. 

“I'm Riley, have we met?” She grins. “I just need your cell phone, Mr. Allen. And unlike Mac, I will promise to return it in one piece.” The man hands it over. “Thank you.” Riley digs through her computer bag, pulling out a cord. “Damn it, that one’s for i-phones. Where’s the micro usb...oh, got it. I hate non-universal input jacks.” She plugs the phone in and attaches it to her computer, scanning through it. 

“Who are you people?” Mrs. Allen asks.

“You...really don’t want to know,” Desi says. “Trust me.” 

“I got 'em.” Riley holds up her computer, open to a map. “The e-mail definitely came from this building.”

“Alright, let’s go. And sorry about the car,” Mac says with a wince. “And your door. But…”

“The ATF will reimburse us, I got it,” Mr. Allen says. “Go save your friend and her dog!” 

* * *

WAREHOUSE

THE PREFERRED HAUNT OF BAD GUYS EVERYWHERE

Jack watches Mac scramble up on top of a stack of crates outside a grimy window, wiping away some dust with his sleeve and peering in like he’s the plucky protagonist of some middle school kid’s detective novel. He frowns and tilts his head, then glances down at the others below him almost as if he’s surprised to see them there. 

_ Right. This op must be flashback city for him. _ Jack wonders how many times the kid took on gangs like this singlehandedly, then decides he’s better off not dwelling on that one too much. 

“Well, I definitely see the smugglers, but no Cody and Maria,” Mac whispers.

“What are they doing, Mac?” Jack asks. He really hopes it’s not preparations to dispose of a body.

“They're placing wrapped weapons into containers.” Mac shrugs. “Wait. All right. They got Maria and Cody. They've got them at gunpoint.”

“Mac, Matty and Bozer’ve got a tac team en route. They're 20 minutes out,” Riley says. 

“Yeah, I don’t know if we have that much time,” Mac replies. “I’m gonna toss my comm in there, see if we can pick up what they’re saying.” 

A second later, he’s pulled his comm out of his ear and slipped it through a gap between the window and the wall. Jack cringes at the sound of thudding as the small device tumbles down a stack of boxes, then comes to rest presumably on the floor. Riley grabs her rig and starts working. 

“Okay, I got them. It’s kind of faint, but…” 

Jack strains to catch the voices. “Get him to do his thing,” Someone says in a menacing growl.

Maria’s answer is shaky and strained. “He doesn't perform well under pressure. That's not how this works.”

“Make it work.” The growly-voiced man insists. 

“Find it. Find it. Find it.” Jack hears whining and yelps, Cody is clearly picking up on the tension and the bad situation, just like Mickey does for Mac.  _ And if he reacts to a threat like Mickey would...things could escalate fast.  _

“Wait. I know what they wanted Cody for,” Mac says, sliding down from the crates to join the others. “They were gonna kidnap him so that he could help them shore up holes in their operation.”

“What?” Desi asks. 

“Maria said Cody's the best detection dog she's ever worked with, right? If those guys find a way to mask the scent of their guns from him, they'll be able to smuggle weapons anywhere.”

“This is bigger than just guns,” Jack says. “If they succeed at fooling Cody, they could bring anything into our country. Drugs, chemical weapons, biological weapons, nuclear weapons.”

“Yeah, we get it, Jack. It's bad,” Riley mutters. 

Jack stops talking, because the conversation in his comms has just gotten a lot louder. “You're upsetting him!” Maria says sharply, and then there’s a slap and thud. Jack winces. 

“Get the dog,” the growly man says. “If you can't get your mutt under control, you're of no use to us.” There’s the sound of a gun cocking. 

“We need to get in there, now,” Jack says, turning toward the door and pulling his sidearm. But the next second, there’s a furious bark, a yell, a loud pop of a gunshot...and a thunderous boom. Jack flinches as window glass shatters around them and the smell of smoke drifts out. 

“Mac, was that an explosion?” Matty shouts over comms, so loudly Jack flinches, and apparently also loudly enough it’s audible to Mac. 

“Yeah. The warehouse is on fire. But it’s not my fault!” Mac insists. 

“Fire and rescue is on its way to you now,” Bozer says. Jack can hear the tension in his voice. 

“Boze says fire and rescue is coming.” 

Mac shakes his head. “They're never gonna make it in time. That warehouse is full of guns and who knows what else. The whole thing could blow at any second.” Jack watches him shudder. He has to be remembering the explosion that ended his career as a vigilante.  _ Except that fire  _ was _ his fault, he set it trying to destroy those guns. And he paid a high price for doing a good thing. _

“Guys, maybe I’m missing something, but if the fire department isn’t getting here fast enough...What's the plan?” Desi asks, 

Mac shrugs. “We go in.” And without a second’s delay, he dashes to the door.

“Is he always this...crazy?” Desi asks as she jumps up and follows Jack behind Mac.

“Oh, this isn’t even close to the craziest thing he’s done with fire,” Jack chuckles. “He set a Somalian aid clinic on fire  _ with us inside it _ , when I first met him. And there was this time he ran into an invisible methanol fire with CO2 canisters to explode and make a path.” 

“And you voluntarily keep working with him?” Desi yells to be heard over the roar of the flames.

“Hell yeah.”

“You’re as crazy as he is!” 

Jack ignores the ache in his ankle as he races across the warehouse floor to where Maria is lying on the ground, blood dripping sluggishly from a gash across her forehead. He kneels beside her and allows himself a brief moment of relief when she blinks awake while he reaches for her wrist to check her pulse. 

“Maria. You okay?”

“Where's Cody?” She asks, trying to sit up and grimacing. 

“He must have run off,” Mac says. 

“Oh, I have to... I have to find him.”

“No, no. We got to get you out of here; you're hurt bad,” Jack says, slipping an arm under Maria’s shoulder. 

“I'm not, I'm not leaving without Cody,” Maria insists. 

“Fire and rescue are still ten minutes away. Get out of there,” Bozer says, and Jack can tell the poor guy’s about two minutes from losing it completely.

There’s a bark from somewhere in the building, and Maris looks up. 

“Cody!”

“Get Maria out of here. I got Cody,” Mac says.

“I’ll help you,” Desi says. “We’ll split up and call for him.” Mac nods, and takes off in one direction, Desi in the other.

“They’ll get Cody, I got you, okay?” Jack says, supporting Maria as they limp slowly to the door. 

Riley meets them as soon as they’re out, helping Maria to sit down on a nearby crate. 

“Fire department's five minutes out,” Bozer says. “Where are you guys?”

Jack coughs and clears his throat before answering. “We got Maria, but Mac and Desi went after Cody. They're still in there.” he coughs again, pulls his shirt a little higher over his face, and then turns back to the door. 

“Jack, where are you going?” Maria asks. 

“To get Mac and Desi and Cody.”

* * *

Mac stumbles through the smoky warehouse, yelling until the combination of that and the smoke make his throat burn. “Cody! Cody!”

He’s afraid of drawing attention down on himself, but it seems like the smugglers, faced with the chance of dying in the fire, have run off. It wouldn’t be the first time he’s fought bad odds in a smoke and fire filled room, but he doesn’t want to have to do it right now.  _ Fortunately, these kid of guys tend to be pretty pragmatic, they prefer to live. _

Finally, he hears a bark, but it’s coming from behind him.  _ Desi must be closer. _ He wishes he had his comms in to tell her, but she probably already heard the bark. He turns around and starts fighting his way back through the grey haze.

He steps around a corner and slams into a heavy body.  _ Damn it, they didn’t all leave, or maybe they tried and the fire blocked their exit.  _ He throws a punch, hoping it’ll disorient the guy enough to give him time to bolt, because he can’t afford to fight and get knocked out and left for dead with the fire getting worse.

“Whoa, hoss, it’s me.” Jack’s voice is muffled by cloth, but reassuring nonetheless. “Cool it. I’m here to help.”

“I heard Cody that way,” Mac says, grabbing Jack’s hand and moving it in the direction the bark came from. He can’t be sure Jack will be able to see him point. “That’s where Desi went.”

Jack immediately turns and runs off in that direction, and Mac follows. 

There’s a creaking sound, and Mac instinctively looks up. “Jack! Stop, the ceiling’s caving in!” Jack skids to a halt, and turns away, covering his face with his arm as beams and boards crash down in front of him. 

“Desi! Can you hear me? Desi! Desi!” Jack yells. 

“Jack!” The voice is close, but clearly coming from the other side of the flaming debris. “I can't get to you! There's no other way out!”

“Mac, can you…” Jack turns and glances at him. 

“I'll be back.”

Mac pulls his shirt over his mouth to try and stop some of the smoke from getting through. It’s not the first time he’s been inside a burning building, and he’s sure it won’t be the last. The smell of the plastic gun housings melting is suffocating, and he cringes as it triggers memories of the gun-running warehouses he purposefully torched as the “Phoenix”. 

_ When I was a kid, I learned a lot about fire. Mostly in self-defense. After the one time I almost burned the whole garden shed down, I learned how to put out accidental fires fast so James wouldn’t get mad. One of the fastest ways to put out a fire is with fire-fighting foam, which can be made with readily available items from a kitchen. Or, in this case, a storage warehouse. _

Mac shifts boxes and tubs until he finds the things he wants. It looks like the smugglers decided to take up residence in the distribution warehouse of a grocery store chain, which is good for him, because it means he can find everything he needs.

_ Start with baking soda. Add liquid soap. And a whole lot of vinegar. Combine it all together in a container. And then, to distribute it, all you need is a hose and a pump. And any will do. I used a weedkiller spray jug as a seven-year-old, but this vacuum sealed container should do the trick just as well.  _ Mac dumps the contents of the pail into the tub, then shoves on the lid and starts rolling the tub down the corridor toward Desi and Cody.  _ And voila, you've got basically the same stuff professional firefighters use. And no more burned garden sheds. Granted, I just found other ways to piss James off… _

He rushes back with his improvised foam and begins spraying it on the burning beams. “Okay, hurry. It won’t work long.” 

Jack jumps over the blackened, smoldering wood, and takes Cody from Desi, who pulls her own shirt up and follows him.

Jack keeps up a steady stream of chatter. “Let's go. Good boy. Here we go. Good boy. Good boy. Come on, Cody. We got it, boy.” 

Finally, all of them stumble out the door, coughing and sooty, but alive. Jack lets Cody down, and the minute he sees Maria, the dog runs to her, barking and whining. Jack turns to Mac and grins, and Mac gives him a weak high-five.  _ We’re alive. We did it. _

* * *

MAC AND JACK’S HOUSE

NOTHING IS BURNING

FOR ONCE

“Hey, Bozer,” Mac says. “Leanna. Riley’s already out on the deck, I’m just gonna go let Mickey out of the garage and put on his leash so he doesn’t go nuts with . Maria and Cody are out there too.” He coughs again into his shirtsleeve. Medical cleared them all, but insisted that the mild smoke inhalation means he and Jack and Desi need to take it easy for a while. 

“Okay, great.” Bozer glances out at the deck. “Firepit not working?”

Riley chuckles. “Oh, no, firepit works fine. We just had enough fire for a while.”

Jack steps out onto the porch with a handful of bottles. “All right, guys, good news. The smugglers tried to run, but our Phoenix tac team was able to round up most of them. The ones that got away will soon be in custody. The ghost guns, at least the ones that didn't burn up in the fire, were confiscated. And the smugglers even gave up the turncoat ATF agent. So now he's in custody, too. All in all, a very good day.”

Maria looks up with a smile as Jack hands her a bottle of orange soda. “Hey. I wanted to say thank you. From both of us.” She ruffles a hand through Cody’s fur behind his ears, and the dog pants and snuffles. His paws are wrapped up in bandages, scorched from the hot concrete he was running on. Mac grimaces in sympathy, remembering his burns from New Orleans. 

“You are very welcome. And if you two are ever in the neighborhood, feel free to drop by,” Mac says. “I’m gonna go grab Mickey now so you can see him.” He grabs the leash from the hook by the door and walks into the garage, holding the door behind him so Mickey can’t push his way past.

“Hey, bud, yeah, I know, I smell like another dog. I’m such a traitor,” Mac chuckles as Mickey sniffs his hands and pantlegs and whines. “But you can meet him in a minute, if you behave.” He clips the leash onto Mickey’s collar and leads him out to the deck. 

“Hey!” Maria says as Mickey hops up the steps. “You’re such a grown up fellow! I didn’t even recognize you!” She laughs. “Come here, buddy.” Mickey obediently trots across the deck and sits down near Maria's feet when Mac tugs the leash a little. 

“Wow, he’s done well with you!” She ruffles Mickey’s ears. “You’ve been a good boy for Mac, haven’t you?”

“Oh, he has,” Mac says. “Honestly, I don’t know what I’d do without him. This past year has been rough, he got me through a lot.”

“Dogs are good for that.” Maria smiles. “Aren’t they, Cody?” She smiles as the two dogs touch noses and then paw at each other. Mickey sniffs the bandages on Cody’s paws and whines, turning to Mac with large, sad eyes. 

“It’s okay, bud. It’s not me this time, I can still pet you,” Mac says with a small chuckle. “He’s learned to associate the smell of burn ointment with me not being able to touch him. Unfortunate accident last year.” 

“I’m glad you guys are okay,” Maria says. “Or I hope so. Where’s your friend?”

“Guess she’s not coming,” Mac says.

“Desi’s a little frosty. Might take her a while to want to spend time with our crazy family,” Jack says. “She’ll come around, don’t worry. She knows this is an open invitation.” He sits down and hands Mac a bottle. “But she bounced back from the fire as fine as any of us.” 

There’s a knock at the door, and Mac stands up. “Must be Matty, she said she was gonna be late tonight.” Mickey follows him to the door, and then begins to tug the leash eagerly. 

“Yeah, you like Matty, don’t you…” Mac swings the door open. “Uh...Desi?” 

“Sorry I’m late. I needed to buy  _ you _ decent chips,” She tosses a bag of spicy ranch potato chips in his direction, “and Carlo some food and a leash.”

“Huh?” And then Mac sees the big brown eyes and long face almost hidden behind Desi’s legs. “You kept him?”

“Fostering until they can find a new owner,” Desi says stiffly. “It’s better for him if he’s kept with someone than if he’s sitting in a cage at the shelter.”  _ You want to keep him and you just won’t admit it. _ Mac smiles. Suddenly Desi Nguyen seems a lot more human and a lot more like someone who could be a friend. 

Mickey trots up, and Mac grabs his collar quickly. “Hey, easy, you need to make friends slowly.” Mickey stops, sitting down, and Carlo takes a hesitant step forward. Mac watches the basset waddle across the floor and slowly sniff Mickey’s muzzle when the bigger dog leans down to sniff him. 

“Guess they’ll get along,” Desi says. 

“Yeah, I think so.” Mac smiles. “I think they will.” 


	17. LIDAR+Rogues+Duty

###  316-LIDAR+Rogues+Duty

MAC’S HOUSE

BEST PLACE FOR FAMILY GAME NIGHT

“Oooh. Park Place with one house. Pay up, Jack,” Riley says, holding out her hand.

“Seriously?” Jack asks. “You’re gonna bankrupt me here, you really want to do that to your own father?”

“What, you want the senior citizen discount?” Riley asks. “Fine, I won’t take you for all you’re worth. You can keep that fifty tucked under the corner of the board.”

“Damn. You know all the tricks o’ me trade too well, kiddo.” Jack chuckles. “Guess I can’t use ‘sneak money’ on you anymore.” 

“No, you can’t. Or on Mac either,” Riley says.

“She told you?”

“Sibling rivalry takes a backseat to sibling ganging up on parents,” Mac says with a shrug. “I think she’s taking full advantage of our new status.” 

Riley grins and hands him the dice.

“Okay, let’s see  _ you  _ make it past my corridor of doom. I may be willing to share Jack’s trade secrets, but that doesn’t mean I’ll let you get away with not giving me the full price for my monopoly.” She’s managed to collect all of the green and navy blue properties, and she has houses on the biggest green, and both blues. Mac has a monopoly on yellows that almost wiped Riley out last time she went around, and Diane has all the pink. Jack has...brown. 

Mac rolls an eight, neatly scooting past all of Riley’s holdings and landing on the first of Jack’s. 

“Slumming in the low rent district with me, huh?” Jack asks as Mac hands over the small rent price and collects two hundred dollars from Diane, who’s been elected banker of this game. He hands Mom the dice, and she rolls double twos for a four, landing safely on Free Parking. Another roll, double fours, lands her neatly on the only unowned utility, which she happily hands...herself the money for, and pulls out of the stack. She picks up the dice again. 

“You roll doubles again, Mom, and you’re gonna be in trouble.” None of them have gone to jail yet this game, and Riley’s noticed that everyone is tactfully avoiding mentioning anything about it around Mac.  _ But the game was his choice, I wonder if he forgot that part, or if it just won’t bother him. _ Sometimes Riley’s afraid she’s treating Mac with too much caution, that he’s actually a lot less fragile than she...and Jack...assume. 

_ Usually better safe than sorry anyway, but I’m starting to wonder if we’re suffocating him. _ The addition of Desi, an outsider with no knowledge of Mac’s past, or his triggers, has reminded Riley sharply of how much of her perspective of his capabilities and issues is because she’s been there for  _ everything. _ From Bishop, to James, to Murdoc.  _ Makes me wonder if I’m seeing an old version of him. One that might not exist anymore except in my head. _

She reaches for the dice when it’s her turn, but a loud bang from the front door of the house makes her jump, dropping them on the floor. She leaps to her feet, just in time to see a team of people in black body armor swarming the house.

_ Phoenix tac? Did something happen? An alarm? _ But the next second she knows it’s not their people, because they’re yelling at her and Jack and Mac and Mom to get on the ground, to show them their hands. She winces when Jack, who tried to argue, is slammed down hard on the deck beside her. She spares a moment to be grateful Mickey is staying with Desi and Carlo tonight; Mac hasn’t gone to pick him up since his and Jack’s op finished; apparently Desi said something about the dogs bonding well and socialization being good for Carlo.  _ Mickey would have gone crazy trying to protect Mac. They might have shot him.  _   
She can hear Mac starting to panic, his breaths are too loud even over the shouting and pounding feet. He isn’t going to react well to this, she remembers last Christmas all too well. And that was before Murdoc tortured Mac for three months. He has so many more terrible memories now, there’s no way he’s not going to start losing it. 

“Hey, careful with him, he-” Jack’s voice is cut off with a gasp, like he’s been hit. Riley can’t see what’s happening past the hair that’s fallen into her eyes when she hit the floor. She wishes she could hold Mac’s hand, reassure him that it’s going to be okay, they’re going to get out of this, but she can’t. She has to hope he’s strong enough to stay calm until thy get this sorted out. 

She’s yanked back to her feet, hands cuffed behind her back, and shoved toward the door. She stumbles, her foot rolling over one of the scattered dice on the floor. 

The irony is not lost on Riley.  _ Go to jail, go directly to jail. Do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars. _ The problem is, she doesn’t think these guys are going to accept a Monopoly ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ card.  _ What the hell is going on? _

… 

COUNTY JAIL

DIANE IS VERY GLAD TO BE LEAVING

Diane takes a grateful breath of the smoggy LA morning air. “Thank your boss for me, Riley,” she says. “That was nice of her to handle my release as well.” She knows Matty Webber is a busy and likely at the moment very stressed woman. She didn’t have to pull so many strings, but she did, and Diane is grateful. 

“Matty takes care of family. And you are family.” Riley says. She’s still looking back at the building. “I wonder what happened to Mac and Jack?” 

“Maybe it’s taking longer because of Mac’s record?” Diane hates the idea that someone would look at that sweet boy and see danger and threat. Not that she hadn’t worried about Riley working closely with an ex-con when she first found out who Mac was, but she’d never thought he was capable of cold-blooded cruelty. She’d just been afraid when his past came knocking Riley would get in between.

She’s not sure that’s not what happened last night. After all, it was his house that was raided. But she isn’t angry at Mac. She’s worried. As much as she’s trying to be calm for Riley, she wants to know where Mac and Jack are too. She knows if Mac is in serious trouble, Jack will be right there with him, trying to solve it and probably digging his own hole right along with Mac. She admires that loyalty, but she’s also skating on the edge of panic and would really like to see her son and fiance after the night she’s had. 

And then the door opens again and Jack steps out, an arm around Mac’s shoulder gently. “Hey, kiddo, we’re good. Okay?”

Mac nods, but he’s visibly shaking and his fingers are tapping frantically against his leg. Diane isn’t sure how best to comfort him. He told her bits and pieces of what exactly his past entailed, and just those few vague mentions broke her heart. She can tell it was hard for him to say, but that he’d wanted her to know about his life now that she’s going to become a very big part of it. She’s proud of him for that, and she wants him to know he can trust her with the broken pieces. But that means not pushing him before he’s ready for it, and she isn’t sure if physical comfort will make him panic more instead of soothing him. 

“Alright, you ready to get out of here?” Riley asks, pulling out her phone. 

“Are you calling an Uber?” Diane asks.

“No, one better. I’m finding one of our drop cars,” Riley says. 

Diane frowns. “What’s that?”

“Well, Phoenix does a fair amount of kind of unsanctioned domestic soil operations,” Riley answers as they walk. “Sometimes we need to ditch a car to avoid police involvement or just in general when tailing a suspect, and so Phoenix has planted nondescript sedans and SUVs around the city in various locations.” She holds up her phone, which is showing a red navigation dot on a map of LA. “One of our drop vehicles is a mile from here.”

Diane isn’t sure she’ll ever be over how calm and competent Riley is when it comes to this kind of thing. Her daughter is totally immersed in the world of being a top secret agent.  _ How did I miss this part of her life for so long?  _

They step into a small used-car lot, and Riley flashes a badge on her phone, and the salesman leads her back to a dark blue Tahoe. He hands Riley the keys, and she tosses them to Jack, who gets in the driver’s seat. Mac climbs in behind him, still shivering, and Riley and Diane get in the back.

It isn’t until they pull out of the lot that someone breaks the silence. 

“I’m sorry,” Jack says. 

Diane shakes her head. “I’m pretty sure that’s the second time you’ve invited me to the house only to have the cops show up and hold us at gunpoint. And then there was the time my  _ daughter  _ pulled a gun on a man.” She raises an eyebrow at Jack.  _ I’m over the shock, or at least the initial one of finding out my daughter is a covert operative.  _ But some part of her will never forget Riley’s stone-cold, determined face as she held a weapon to a man’s head. “As long as it doesn’t happen at our wedding, I think I can forgive this one.”

“Especially since it wasn’t even a legit call,” Riley adds. “Matty pulled some strings and found out what happened. We got SWATted.”

“Which is?” Diane asks. 

“Basically, someone calls the police to report an innocent person for a bomb threat or terrorism. Law enforcement has to take any of those reports seriously.” Riley shrugs. “Which is how  _ we _ wound up staring down the barrels of a dozen M-4s.” 

Jack glances at Riley. “Yeah. And if we were normal people, I’d say it was a neighbor we pissed off, or something like that. But…” Jack frowns. “I don’t think any of Mac’s neighbors are the type to do that.”

Mac nods. “None of them are. Mrs. Schwartz might  _ say _ she’s going to call the cops when I blow things up in the backyard, but it’s all bluster.” He gives Jack a weak smile. They’ve been practically glued to each other since they met up with Riley and Diane, and Mac looks pretty rattled. Not like he’s going to panic in the next five minutes, but definitely more upset than Riley.  _ Who laid down on a bench and fell asleep in about three minutes after we were put in that cell. _ Diane wonders how many worse places Riley’s spent time, then decides she’s better off not thinking about it. Her mind can already conjure up enough pictures of the kind of places an American agent could end up if things went wrong. 

“You don’t think it  _ was _ something you made?” Riley asks suddenly. “Maybe you have some new neighbors, and the grill exploded again and made them skittish?”

Mac shakes his head. “I haven’t blown anything up in...at least a week. If someone called the cops about one of my inventions, I think it would have been more...immediate.” 

“Well, it’s not like Mac’s house is the best kept secret in L.A.,” Riley says. “No offense, but...that place has been broken into like...five separate times?”

“Yeah, and most of those times were by pretty nasty people,” Jack says. “Murdoc, Fletcher, the Ghost…”

“But Fletcher’s dead now,” Mac says. Diane suppresses a shiver.  _ It scares me sometimes to get these glimpses into my daughter’s world. And now, my son’s. _ “Besides, why would any of them call the police on me? I think they’d rather deal with me themselves.” 

“Whatever it is, we’ll figure it out,” Jack says. “And we are not going back to the house until we do. I’ll call Matty, have her get us a safe house…”

“Actually, Jack, I’d hold off,” Riley says. “If it wasn’t Mac’s neighbors, and not one of the enemies we know have his location, then...that means someone could have access to our personal dossiers from Phoenix. Because our information is supposed to be classified. And if they have that, any safe houses could be compromised too.”

“You can stay at my apartment,” Diane offers. “It’s big enough for you all to come over. Riley stayed when her house was being fumigated.” 

“I don’t know, Di. I mean...whoever’s after us, we don’t know what they want, and this feels like some kind of messed up game,” Jack says. “I don’t want to put you in danger.”

“Whatever you’re involved in, I’m involved in, too,” Diane says. “Jack, you and Mac and Riley are my family. Which means I will do anything I can to protect you. I may not be able to fight off a dozen men, but I can at least give you a safe place to stay.” She meets Jack’s eyes in the rearview mirror. “I want you all safe.”

Mac gives her a weak smile. “Thank you.”

“Are you alright?” She asks.

“I will be.” He turns around in the seat a little. “Jack made sure I was safe.”

“I’m sure he did. Jack is good at protecting the people he loves.” Diane says. She reaches forward and takes Mac’s cold, trembling hand in her own, then slips him a paperclip that she found rattling around the cupholder in the back seat. “And if you’ll let me, I’d like to work on being that kind of parent to you too.” 

“I haven’t...had a mom since…” Mac swallows. “Thank you.”

Diane watches him shape the paperclip into two tiny interconnected hearts.

… 

THE PHOENIX LABS

MAC DEFINITELY PREFERS THIS TO A CELL

Mac’s taken two showers at Diane’s, and he still doesn’t feel clean. Jack made sure never to leave his side in the holding cell, all night, but Mac just can’t shake the feeling of being dirty and violated. He knows he’s okay, but bars and grimy concrete definitely is never going to mean anything other than memories of prison and everything that was done to him.

“Are you sure you should be here?” Jack asks. “Diane was worried about you at breakfast. She’s taking this new parent thing really seriously.” Mac remembers, she was fussing over him the whole time he pushed his French toast around on his plate. He thought he’d gotten a motherly influence back in his life with first Patty, then Matty, but neither of them is exactly like Diane. Diane is the kind of mom Mac always grew up seeing in movies that had happy endings. She’s gentle and reassuring, and maybe a little unsure how to handle his fragility and the sharp edges of all his broken pieces, but he thinks they’ll get there. 

“I’ll be okay. Once we figure out who did this,” Mac says weakly. He doesn’t think he can rest or feel safe again until he knows that the person who wanted him arrested isn’t going to be able to hurt him anymore.

Jack wraps an arm around his shoulders. Mac thinks there should be a permanent imprint of Jack’s arm there after last night. Jack never left his side the whole time they were in the cell. “I know, kiddo. I know.”

Mac swallows hard. He feels like he’s still stuck in the endless loop that last night was. 

_ Exhausted and adrenaline crashing after the raid, starting to drift off to sleep on the hard bench in the cell. Smells and sounds and memories crashing in and bringing back the worst things of the past. Jack shaking him gently to pull him back out, and tugging him a little closer.  _

Mac probably only caught a half hour of restless sleep. He couldn’t relax, not when at any moment someone who wanted to attack him could be thrown in that cell with them.  _ Jack would protect me, but if he couldn’t win, or if they took him away like Lima… _ Mac doesn’t want to let his mind wander to the likely consequences. 

Riley looks angry, where she’s sitting at a desk in the lab, her rig open in front of her, fingers smacking the keys in a staccato rhythm Mac knows is her rage typing.“Any luck on tracing whoever did this?” Jack asks.

“Not yet. The call was made from, get this, a pay phone in a bus stop.” Riley says. “I didn’t even know they still had those.” 

“Can you get security cameras from the bus stop?” Jack asks. 

“Only exterior. There’s no camera showing who would have used that phone. And there’s over two hundred people who entered and exited around that time. The voice on the phone was male, so that narrows it down, but this is still too many people to sort through.” 

Jack’s phone pings, and he glances at Mac after reading whatever it says. “Mac...uh, Matty wants us in the War Room.” Jack frowns. “She said it’s urgent.”

“Go,” Riley says. “I’ll figure out who our mystery SWATter was.” 

Mac can feel his stomach churning the whole way to the War Room. If Matty said this was urgent, it might have something to do with last night. Some reason for why he was targeted.  _ Who would do this? _ He can think of a lot of enemies who might like to see him back in prison for real, but who would call in a false alarm? This was a psychological move, someone playing a game and trying to intimidate and frighten him. Probably someone who knew about his past. He’d say it was Murdoc but Riley says Friar confirmed no one in the bus stop was him. Not even wearing a mask, none of the approximate heights or walking gaits matched his. Then again, the man is a chameleon. And this is exactly the kind of game he would play.  _ He doesn’t just love physically torturing me. He likes to get inside my mind and play. _

Matty’s serious face when he pushes open the door doesn’t do a thing to set his mind at ease. There’s a deep sadness in her brown eyes that Mac hasn’t seen since the whole disaster with Ethan. 

“Mac, you might want to sit down.” 

He does, but the chair feels almost too comfortable, so he moves to the arm of it, letting Jack rest a hand on his shoulder in support. “Is this about James? Or Murdoc?”

“No.” Matty looks at him with sad eyes. “Remember the LIDAR system you were developing?”

“Yes…” Mac doesn’t see how this connects. At all. His brain is struggling to process the idea that something else has gone horribly wrong. Something other than the disaster at the house last night. 

“The test pilot who was using it on his plane...Robert Reese?” Matty says. Mac nods again, the man is one of Jack’s old military buddies who came to work for Phoenix last year. He was excited about helping Mac with the LIDAR project. 

“His plane crashed in the Armenian forest two hours ago. He’s MIA, presumed killed on impact.” 

“Damn it, Reese was a good guy,” Jack says. “He’s got two kids. Recruited him myself. Promised him Phoenix would be a safer bet than reupping for another tour.” Mac risks a glance up, and sees the devastation on his face.

“I know, Jack.” Matty puts a hand on his knee. “This is a shock, and that’s why I wanted you to hear it from me.”

“Have you told his family?”

Matty just nods. “I thought you would want to talk to them in person, but I didn’t want them to hear it through another way first.”

Jack nods. “Do we know how this happened?”

“Unfortunately we don’t. The only clue we have...is that it happened while he was using the LIDAR.”

“What?” Mac asks. He suddenly realizes why Matty warned him to sit down. This is terrible. This is worse than terrible. This is a nightmare. He wants to wake up. He wants to wake up so badly, but he doesn’t think that’s going to happen, because he’s been telling himself this since the raid on the house last night. 

Matty’s voice is soft and sympathetic, but Mac doesn’t deserve the kindness. Not when this man’s death is his fault. Not when he took away two kids’s father.  _ No, no, no.  _ “He was testing the system mapping the rural Armeinian terrain. Only, once he was in the air, about thirty seconds after he switched on the LIDAR, his jet suffered a massive systems failure and crashed.”

“Was he able to eject?” Jack asks. 

“There is no evidence to suggest he did. I’m sorry.”

“Wait, are you saying I killed him?” Mac asks. He feels like the room is floating, like the walls are receding somehow, like everything is going black. He’s going to pass out. He is. He can’t handle this.  _ No, no, no. _ If it’s true, he deserves to be right back in the cell where he spent the night. Without Jack. Without safety. 

_ Jack told his friend he’d be safe, and now I killed him. _ He wonders what will happen when someone decides to investigate the crash. If everyone else will come to the same conclusion he has, that this is his fault. That the closure the grieving family deserves is to put Mac somewhere he can’t hurt anyone ever again, even by accident. He’d deserve it. _ What must Jack think of me? He trusts me with his life on missions, he has to be wondering if that was a mistake. If he can depend on me to keep us alive anymore. _ Honestly Mac doesn’t know if they can. He thought the LIDAR was safe, and it killed Reese. What if the next time, the thing he thinks will work kills Jack? Or Riley? Or Bozer? Or Leanna? Or Desi? Or all of them?

Maybe the best thing for all of them is to take Mac out of the field and put him back in a cell. For good. He swallows hard, he doesn’t want to let Matty or Jack see him crying. He doesn’t want their sympathy or pity. He doesn’t deserve it. 

“ _ No, _ kiddo.” Jack’s voice is sharp and hard. “No one said that.” He’s glaring at Matty. 

“He’s right, Mac, this wasn’t your fault. We don’t know if it was even the LIDAR that malfunctioned. It could have been a coincidence.” Matty sighs. “I’m sorry, Mac, we don’t know, at this point, what happened. And because the jet’s black box stopped transmitting at the time of failure, the only way to find out what happened…”

“Is in the wreckage somewhere in Armenia, where we’re technically not supposed to be.” Jack sighs. “Matty, we need answers, we need to know what happened. Mac needs closure. And Reese’s family deserves to have him get a proper burial. I can’t just leave him there. I made a promise to him and his family that he’d be safe. The least I can do is bring his body home.” 

“You won’t be able to officially do anything. But...that family deserves closure. And so do you, Mac.” Matty says. “The Phoenix jet is fueled and ready to go. You and Mac should take Desi with you, she’ll be an objective party.”

Mac nods. He knows it’s important to have someone who won’t be emotional about this mess. Because he certainly isn’t. He can’t believe this is happening again. Just like Ramsay. A man with a family, his life over because of what Mac did.  _ I didn’t kill Ramsay, but the cartel killed him for failing to stop me from destroying their shipment.  _ And maybe he didn’t put a gun to Reese’s head, but he did install the LIDAR in the man’s plane. 

The room feels like it’s spinning again when he stands up, but he forces the black dots at the edges of his vision away. He can’t afford to pass out. He has a job to do. And amends to make. 

…

SOMEWHERE OVER ARMENIAN AIRSPACE

THEY’RE NOT TECHNICALLY SUPPOSED TO BE HERE

Jack is half asleep in the Phoenix jet’s seats. He can’t really fall asleep, not with everything weighing on him so heavily. But he does catch himself dozing a few times. Unfortunately, every time he starts to actually go under, the nightmares hit. Watching Reese’s plane fall out of the sky, hearing the man’s accusing voice. “You promised my family I’d be safe. Jack, I thought Daltons always kept their promises. You failed.”

But even worse is the far more persistent nightmare of Mac dragged away from him in that holding cell, of being absolutely powerless to fight back as his kid is subjected to the unthinkable. And once again, Mac’s voice and eyes are accusing. “You promised to protect me, to keep me safe. You failed me.”

Jack shakes himself out of the most recent dream with a shudder. The worst is that he can’t deny it’s true. He promises so much. But he can’t always follow through. He’s promised Mac over and over that he won’t be hurt again, but Mac always is. Jack feels powerless and helpless, and like he never should have made those promises in the first place. Like he’s only going to break Mac’s heart more when they inevitably fall apart. 

The kid in question has been withdrawn and distant since they got on the jet. Jack had assumed Mac would want to be close, want to be comforted. He’d been clinging to Jack’s side like a burr on a saddle blanket since they got out of prison, and this…

But Mac hasn’t come near him since they boarded. He’s isolated himself in a seat in a corner, refusing any attempts Jack’s made to engage him in any kind of conversation, and pushing aside the blanket Jack tried to drape over him, but never meeting Jack’s eyes. It kills him to see the kid punish himself this way.  _ He thinks it’s his fault, and no matter how many times I try to tell him it’s not, he won’t believe me.  _ He isn’t even sure Mac’s heard what he’s said, the poor kid is so far gone in his own head. 

And Jack isn’t entirely sure Mac hasn’t totally lost it. He’s sitting in his seat tracing one finger through the air in weird lines and corners, mumbling to himself. Jack bites his lip and stands up, grimacing at the aches from spending the night on an uncomfortable jail bench. He walks over to Mac, who doesn’t even seem to acknowledge that he’s there, still drawing and muttering. 

Jack glances at the table briefly, then looks away. It’s covered with paperclips formed into the shapes of handcuffs. 

“What are you doing?” he asks, and Mac stops, but doesn’t look at him. 

“Tracing the wiring in the LIDAR in Reese's plane.” Mac says. “I wired it in line with the jet’s electrical systems, it shouldn’t have drawn power from the jet’s safety features. It should have functioned just like one of the other components, like the landing gear or the climate control system. I didn’t override anything, or patch it into another system; I can’t figure out where I went wrong.”

“And you’re trying to solve it by drawing lines in the air?” Jack asks. 

“I’m just trying to figure out what happened up there.”

His poor kid is overworking himself, trying to solve a problem he probably didn’t even cause. Jack hates the sight of the dark circles under his eyes and the shakiness of his hands where they’re working on something Jack can’t even pretend to see. “Well you couldn’t think of it before that plane went up, so why are you trying to figure it out now?” The second the words pass Jack’s lips he regrets them. He knows he’s not at his best. A sleepless night worrying about Mac, spent in an uncomfortable jail cell no less, the stress of wondering who’s behind the SWATting, and the news that Reese is MIA have all piled on. He didn’t mean to snap.

But the damage is done. Mac flinches away from him. _ Flinches. _ Jack shudders at the thought that he probably sounded like James just now. Blaming Mac and saying what happened was his fault.  _ Of course the only thing he would be able to hear from me is anger and blame. _ All Jack’s reassurances fell on deaf ears, but this one...

“Oh kiddo, I’m so sorry.” Jack wants to throw himself out of the plane. They’ve come so far from him being short with Mac and doubting him, and  _ how _ did he ruin three years of good work in one moment? He thought he was better than this. Thought he was past ever doing it again. 

“You’re right, though.” Mac’s voice is soft. “I messed up, and now Reese is dead. It’s on me.”

“No, kiddo, it is not. I am so sorry I said that. I wasn’t thinking about how it would sound, I’m sorry.”

Tears are drawing glittering lines down Mac’s cheeks, and Jack wants to hold him and let him cry into his shirt, but he has the feeling Mac won’t allow that right now. The kid sniffles and swallows hard, his voice hoarse when he speaks. “Please, when you see his family, tell them I’m sorry. Whatever they want to do, they can, I won’t blame them.”

“What?”

“If they want to...it’s my fault, there’s going to be an inquiry, isn’t there?” Mac asks. “Some kind of investigation?”

Jack shakes his head, the remaining fragments of his heart shattering. “Mac, it was an equipment failure. Not intentional sabotage. They won’t court martial you over that.”

“They should.” Jack cringes at the dull acceptance in his kid’s voice. “I killed him. I made a mistake. And I could make another one. In the field with the team. With you. I shouldn’t even have come.” He curls up a little tighter.

Jack sighs. He’s not the only one sleep deprivation and fear have done a number on.  _ Damn it why did all this shit have to happen at once? _

“Mac, I swear. I don’t blame you for this and neither will Reese’s family. They’d be devastated if they found out you thought you were responsible. They wouldn’t want you to do this to yourself.”

“How do you know?” Mac whispers. “Have you seen them since? Maybe they will blame me. Maybe they will be angry. People change when things happen. They’re hurting and they want someone to pay, someone to blame.” Jack bites his lip. It sounds like Mac is speaking from experience.  _ I bet his miserable excuse for a father blamed him for his mom’s death. Because she was going out to get something to help him. Probably used that as an excuse to be bitter and angry and cruel. And now Mac thinks any time he’s in some way connected to a tragedy, no matter how small a thread ties him there, it’s his fault. _

…

THE PHOENIX LABS

BETTER THAN DINNER FOR ONE

Bozer pushes open the lab door with his hands full of carryout Vietnamese. Desi introduced the whole team to a place she found that she claims is the best she’s had since she left home, and Bozer is not inclined to disagree. 

“Bozer? What are you doing down here?” Riley asks. “I thought you and Leanna had dinner plans.”

“She cancelled, said something about a meeting she couldn’t miss. She’s...uh, she’s been acting weird all week,” Bozer says. “Like she’s...trying not to talk to me.”

“What did you do?” Riley asks.

“Nothing!” Bozer raises his hands in surrender. “I didn’t even offer fashion advice.”

Riley rolls her eyes slightly, but then a look of genuine sympathy crosses her face. “Well, I have news for you Boze, not everyone is as open with their emotions and issues as you are. She might have something going on that she’s not ready to share yet. Don’t lose your mind over it.”

He nods. “I’m trying not to. Which is why I thought coming down here and helping you might help distract me.”

“Well, I’m not sure this is any better.” Riley sighs and rubs a hand over her face. “I have been at this for hours. And it feels like a dead end. I can’t match a voice on a phone call to a face on…” 

Bozer grins when she trails off mid-sentence and her eyes light up. It’s the same look Mac gets when he’s talked his way into a solution to a problem, usually by rambling about science stuff Bozer doesn’t understand at all.  _ They really could be siblings.  _ “You’ve got that look in your eyes that says you’re onto something.”

“The voice on the call had a lisp to it. A lisp characteristic of a certain jaw structure. That might help me narrow it down. I can task Friar to scan for that kind of facial structure and see if we get a hit.”

“While he’s on that, you want some lunch?” Bozer asks. “You haven’t come out of the lab all morning, thought you might be hungry.” 

“Yes, I’m starving, and that smells amazing.” Riley lifts the lid of one of the takeout boxes. “Thanks, Boze. This was...really nice.”

“Figured you needed something good about today.” Bozer says, sitting down on a chair next to her. “How’s your mom holding up?”

“Better than me, honestly. She doesn’t really understand how bad this could be,” Riley says around a mouthful of noodles. “Sometimes knowing what kind of dark stuff lurks under the surface of the world is a major curse.”

Bozer nods. “I can’t stop thinking about how naive I was when I look back at my old movie scripts. Everything was so simplistic. And now...I can’t go back to the person I was before. I can’t forget what’s out there.”

“But we can’t dwell on it either, or it’ll drive us crazy,” Riley adds. She twirls her fork in the box absently. “Good agents snap because they can’t distance themselves from the crap they see. From the awful realities they see behind the curtain. At some point, as hard as it is, we have to remember we’re people too, and that we need to protect ourselves so we can protect others. If we give in to feeling overwhelmed, then we’re no good to anyone.”

“How do you do it?” Bozer asks.

“Don’t tell anyone this. Jack would never let me live it down,” Riley says. “I keep a scrapbook.”

“You do?”

“I mean, not in the traditional sense,” Riley says. “It’s digital. But...every time we win, every time we get together, I’m taking pictures. To remind myself of my family, of the good left in the world, and the good left in us. I keep that, and the news articles about our successes, and sometimes pictures of the people we save. And on my worst days, I go there and I look at all that and remember that as bad as the world gets, I can still believe in something. I can still hope.” She smiles, even though Bozer can see that her eyes look glossy. “But honestly, before Mac? I don’t know if I would have lasted much longer without spiraling. I don’t know if Jack would have either. Nick’s ‘betrayal’ would probably have broken us both. But Mac reminded us that sometimes people do the right thing for no other reason than that it’s the right thing to do.” 

Bozer nods. “I did something like that after we lost Jerry,” he says. “Mom would sit and rewatch all my videos that had him in them, and I realized it was just holding her in her grief, so I put them all away. I found them a few years later, and I...edited a movie that was just clips of him. It reminded me that he wouldn’t have wanted us to dwell on the bad things, just on the good.” 

Riley nods. “We’re cursed with knowledge, Bozer. We can’t choose not to know what happens in the world. But we can choose how we live with it.” Riley smiles a little sadly. “Some people live with it with a bottle in their hand, or a bottle of pills. Some can’t live with it. But every day I tell myself I have to be one of the ones who does live with it.” 

Just then her computer pings and Riley almost flings her forkful of noodles across the lab. She grabs her rig and opens a file on it. 

“This man. It has to be him.” Riley pulls up a photo of a middle-aged man. “He’s the only one in the crowd who has the jaw structure that would cause the lisp on that call.” 

“Okay, who is he?”

“Well, this is...weird,” Riley says. “He’s an investment banker. Jorge Vargas.” She opens the files, and Bozer leans over her shoulder to help scan them. But there isn’t anything here throwing red flags for him.

Apparently not for Riley either. “As far as I can see, he’s clean. Nothing under the table with his job, not even a criminal record. Just a couple promptly paid parking tickets and a citation for underage drinking when he was in college.” 

“Why would this guy want to call the cops on Mac?” Bozer asks. “As far as I can tell, he has absolutely no connection to anything Mac’s ever done.”

“Maybe his vigilante past?” Riley says. “Look at this. Jorge’s step-brother was a ranking member of the Meridas. Jorge apparently cut all ties with the criminal side of his family, but his brother was arrested because of Mac.”

“So why wait all this time to get revenge?” Bozer asks. “It just doesn’t add up.”

“Well, let’s have a chat with him and find out.”

…

SOMEWHERE IN ARMENIA

FORESTS ALL KIND OF LOOK THE SAME

Desi picks her way through the tangled foliage. It wouldn’t be the first time she’s hiked through an Armenian forest. This area has been a hot spot for a long time, and she’s been in the thick of more than one op here.

It is the first time she’s been among people she considers friends. Last time she was here was in the company of arms dealers. Still, she’s not sure she’s any less worried about how likely her current companions are to get her killed in the next twenty-four hours. 

Jack stumbles over a depression in the ground then curses and kicks the dirt, sending a small spray of it flying and pattering on the dead leaves. 

Desi frowns at him. “Get your head in the game, Dalton.” She doesn’t like the way he or MacGyver have been acting.  _ Should have done the retrieval myself.  _ Both of them are too emotionally compromised. MacGyver is stuck in a hole of self-blame, digging it deeper with every step, and Dalton...well, there’s no way she plans on trying to understand everything about him, but she can tell he’s pissed at the world in general, and at himself for some unknown reason. “Reese signed up for this. Being a test pilot has its risks. He knew that.”

“He was supposed to be safe.” Jack sighs. “He has two children. A boy and girl. His wife is one of the kindest people I’ve ever met. He deserved better.”

“So do a lot of good people.” Desi says. “But if you can’t focus, we’re going to be the next ones Matty has to send a team to retrieve.” She gets the feeling this isn’t all about Reese. She’s seen Jack lose people before. He understands the world they live in, the sacrifice everyone who’s a part of it is willing to make. Something happened on the way over here. She suddenly wishes she’d kept the line to the team comms open instead of switching it all off and losing herself in the horizon and the clouds.  _ Flying is the only place I can feel truly at peace anymore. _

Whatever happened on that plane, it’s clearly affecting both Dalton and MacGyver, and she can’t afford for them to be off their game right now. She may not be as fond of MacGyver as the rest of his team seems to be, but she’s also in no mood to watch him catch a bullet thanks to distractions. 

She smells the crash before she sees it, the harsh metallic odor of scorched metal and burning jet fuel. Her stomach flips. Ever since Kandahar she hasn’t done well with the aftermath of fire. She’d rather not throw up in front of her new teammates, mostly because she doesn’t want to have to explain such a violent reaction.  _ I wish I could forget that day.  _ But it’s burned, literally and figuratively, into her memories and nightmares forever. 

She sees MacGyver almost crumple into himself at the sight of the wreckage. He acts like he’s been physically wounded. She almost expects to see him start crying.  _ He’s soft, for the field. Maybe he just hasn’t been on the job long. _ But as far as she can tell from his file, which is more blacked out ink than legible words, he’s been with Phoenix going on three years. 

“This is the cockpit area,” MacGyver says weakly. “Reese’s body should…”

“Hey, it’s okay, kiddo, I’ll check first.” Jack moves past him and steps up to the section of broken glass. “This is pretty well tore up, but...I don’t see a body. I mean...the looks of this landing, he could have got thrown. I’ll start checking that area, Mac, if you want to see if you can get the Black Box.” 

MacGyver nods. Desi stands at the edge of the destroyed ground, pulling her scarf over her face to block the smell of smoke.  _ Yes, it seems like an impractical choice of field attire, but a scarf has saved my life more times than I can count. _ It can function as a bandage, a sling, a tourniquet, a face mask, a rope, and more. She’s endured some teasing from fellow agents for her ‘fashion sense’, especially when she wears a scarf as long as this, but they stop laughing when she uses it to save their lives. 

There’s a rattling sound, a short, pained curse, and then MacGyver stands up, shaking his hand. Desi can see a cut welling blood on the back of it, but he immediately goes back to pulling aside a heap of scrap metal to reveal a rather battered item that looks like a satellite dish. “This is the LIDAR,” MacGyver says. “I’m gonna grab it and take it with us too, see if it can tell us what happened.” 

Jack emerges from the woods, his face covered in red lines from branches. “No sign of a body out there anywhere. It kinda looks like maybe he wasn’t in that crash after all.” Desi can see grief warring with hope in his eyes. 

MacGyver holds out the items now wrapped in his leather jacket. “I found the black box and the LIDAR. Maybe Riley can tell us if he ejected after all.” He looks up at Jack. “I swear, it shouldn’t have done that.” 

“I know, kiddo. I didn’t mean to imply…”

“I’m going to find out what’s wrong and I’m going to fix it.” There’s a hard cold determination in his voice. And emptiness.

“I know. But this wasn’t your fault.” Jack frowns, looking down at Mac sadly. “You have to believe that.” 

There’s a low rumble, and Desi looks up to see an approaching cloud of dust filled with the shapes of several olive colored military trucks in it. 

“Guys, I hate to interrupt the heart to heart but we have company.” Desi says, nodding toward the road. “I’m going to see if I can stall them. Get out of here and I’ll follow you.” She’s not entirely sure she can keep that promise, but she has to do something. MacGyver won’t leave without Dalton, or vice versa. Hopefully her picture isn’t still pasted up in every military police post in the area as a weapons runner. 

“You speak Armenian?” Jack asks.

“Turkish. Close enough.” Desi shrugs. 

But the minute she walks out to the trucks, she knows things are about to go sideways. That many raised guns can’t mean anything good, and she’s being yelled at to show her hands even though she definitely already is. 

She shouts that she’s just a hiker in Turkish, but it doesn’t seem to win her any friends, or any trust.  _ Yeah, my picture’s probably still on Armenia’s Most Wanted. _

When the first man grabs for her arm, she flips him on his back and goes into a protective crouch. Beside her, she hears Jack run up, and sees him bodyslam one of the men to the ground before wrenching his gun away and knocking another man out with it. 

_ We don’t want to kill them. They’re just doing their job, they don’t know who we are or that we’re trying to help.  _ Desi’s gone on autopilot, her hands and feet and body moving without her conscious direction. Self defense is second nature. 

“Jack! Desi! Get down!!” MacGyver shouts. Desi instinctively throws herself to the ground and rolls, and she sees Jack do the same, in the other direction, just as a wave of heat blasts past them. She rolls a few more times and looks up to see that somehow, MacGyver has gotten one of the jet engines running again. “Go! Go!” He shouts, and it’s more that she can read his lips than that his voice is audible over the roar of the engine. 

She yanks a set of keys off the belt of one of the men she knocked out, and races toward the jeep she remembers him getting out the driver’s seat of. She leaps in and turns the engine over, then floors it, driving around the wreckage to where MacGyver is still keeping pressure on some kind of lever, and Jack has scrambled to his feet and is running toward him. 

Both of them run toward her, ducking bullets that ping off the jet wreckage. MacGyver stumbles, and Dalton grabs him by the collar of his coat and practically drags him to the jeep like a protesting puppy, bodily flings him in, then dives in and slams the door.

“Go, go, go!” Jack yells breathlessly. 

Desi picks the best path through the trees and slams down the gas.  _ It’s just like driving my ‘Uncle’s’ souped up Jeep through the U.P.  _ Every summer for as long as she can remember, her parents packed them up and took the family vacation across the Mackinac Bridge, to her father’s best friend’s cabin in an off the grid part of the central Upper Peninsula. That’s where Desi learned forest survival, tracking, swimming without a life jacket, and how to drive a car over any road known to man, including the mud-and-rut logging road getting to the cabin required taking. She still remembers the year they got stuck and Dad got out and winched their car out while Desi and her mom pushed. 

“Uncle Jimmy” was perfectly fine with her using the vehicles in the shed, and she’d spent quite a few hours on the dirt trails learning to handle both a jeep and a dirt bike.  _ I wasn’t as much of a peaceful hiker type back then. _ Now, if she ever goes back, she’ll appreciate the stillness and solitude a bit more than her teenage self did. But at the moment, as the jeep tires fling mud and sticks and their vehicle jolts onto the open road, she’s grateful to Uncle Jimmy and his trust in her driving skills. 

… 

SOMEWHERE IN ARMENIA

THIS JEEP SMELLS LIKE SOMEONE KEPT CHICKENS IN IT

Jack taps the fingers of his left hand on his right, brow furrowed in studious concentration. Finally he looks up, both hands held up with all fingers spread. “Five each. We’re tied.”

Desi glances in the broken rearview mirror. “Well, I stole the jeep keys off one of mine, so…”

“That doesn’t count. Jeep is just transportation. Not an enemy combatant.”

“Fine, Mr. Accurate.” Desi says, shaking her head. “From now on, vehicles will not count. So don’t try and weasel out of it when it works in your favor.”

Mac feels a tiny smile creeping up, in spite of himself, in spite of the absolute disaster this day has been. Jack can always make him feel better, especially now that he’s in the mood to joke a little, after confirming repeatedly that Mac’s stumble back at the crash site was nothing more than tripping over some debris.  _ I didn’t catch a bullet, even if Jack had to prove that to himself four times before he was satisfied _ .

Mac is glad that Desi’s willing to banter with Jack, even if she doesn’t seem to be very fond of Mac at the moment. He can’t understand what he did wrong, how he upset her. Or maybe it’s just readjustment to life outside of deep cover. Jack said that can do a number on a person’s social life and interaction.  _ She’s used to not being able to trust anyone, which could explain why it’s taking so long for us to get comfortable around each other. _ He hopes that’s all it is. He knows his file is now sealed per Oversight’s orders, probably at a higher clearance level than Desi is authorized for, but he’s sure there are other ways she could find out about his past. Maybe she has, and she’s not bringing it up to the team, but still worries about his reliability. Or maybe she’s come to the same conclusion he has today, he’s not safe to be around in the field. 

He pulls out the LIDAR and starts working on it, trying to distract himself from the thoughts whirling around his head. The transmission system is totally ruined from the crash, but he might be able to get it up and running again using some of the pieces of his phone; he doesn’t dare ask for Jack’s right now even as a joke.

Jack claims he didn’t mean what he said on the plane, but Mac knows better. The things people say without thinking are the things they really mean and are just normally too polite to voice. 

He’s sure, despite what Jack says, that there will be an inquiry. Because there’s always someone to blame. People want that, when bad things happen. They need someone to be angry at. Mac’s learned the hard way.  _ People can’t get angry at some impersonal thing like an equipment failure or an unforeseen mistake. They can get angry at someone who’s responsible. _

And Mac is responsible. He’s sure everyone else will tell him differently, but the truth is, he did something wrong, and he should have paid for it. He still should. He’s not sure living with the knowledge that he should have been punished and hasn’t would be even worse than if there was a trial and he was sent to prison. He’d almost rather get it over with. He cost a family their father, a good man.

Suddenly, Desi slams on the brakes. Mac jolts forward, smacking his head painfully against the back of the seat in front of him.

“What?” Jack asks, leaning forward. Desi doesn’t answer, just points up and to the right, into the trees above them. There’s something greenish hanging in them, which is odd, because it’s still winter, there’s no leaves...

Jack voices what Mac is thinking before he can manage to get the words out. “Hey, that’s…a parachute.”

“He did eject.” Mac scrambles out of the jeep.  _ If he ejected maybe he’s not dead. Maybe he’s okay.  _ He races across the muddy ground to kneel beside the seat. He can’t see any blood, and it doesn’t look like the seat is severely damaged. 

“Well, he’s definitely not here now. And neither is the medical kit,” Jack says, walking up.

Desi frowns, hands on her knees as she crouches beside Mac. “Doesn’t necessarily mean he survived. Locals could have taken the body and the kit.”

“But there’s only one set of footprints, and they lead away,” Jack says, pointing. “Reese survived that crash, and he’s out here somewhere.”

Mac collapses to sit on the ground, relief bleeding all the adrenaline out of him.  _ Reese is alive. I didn’t kill him.  _ It doesn’t matter that it’s starting to rain, that mud is soaking into his pantlegs. He doesn’t care. He still has a chance to fix his mistake.

He scrambles to his feet. “Okay, let’s find him. Before anyone else does. Unless they already have.” The woods is crawling with military patrols like the ones they ran into. They’ve already almost run into two more, but thanks to Desi’s almost preternatural ability to find good cover off road, they haven’t been caught. 

“Just what I was thinking,” Jack says. “ _ I _ pulled a radio off one of  _ my _ guys, Dez.” He pulls it out of a pocket. “Here, think you can translate what they’re saying?”

Desi listens for a moment. “Bad news, guys. Armenian military is definitely looking for a downed American pilot moving on foot. Sounds like there was a local sighting in a village a couple klicks east.” 

“But they haven’t found him yet?” Mac asks.

“No. They’re still searching.”

“Then we have to find him first.” 

…

Desi brushes wet hair out of her face as she scrambles up the creek bank, pushing brambles and small branches out of her way.  _ This is just like hiking up north. _ She joined Uncle Jimmy’s family a few times for deer season hunting, and it was always the worst weather, just like this, when the deer moved. The nastier the day, the more likely it was to spot a nice sized buck.  _ It was good preparation for sniper training. Waiting for hours in a single spot in all weather, watching for a target.  _ She was more than used to damp clothes and cold trigger fingers before she went to the Farm. 

The rain’s started falling in earnest, and Desi’s grateful for her waterproof jacket. She had her scarf wrapped over her head for a while, but tangling it in low hanging branches and thorny plants was more trouble than it was worth, so she finally took it off and stuffed it in a pocket, in case she has to try and blend in with locals once they reach the village.

Ahead of her, Jack is bent down studying the footprints Reese left. There’s very little impression left in the muddy ground, but Jack is AMOS trained, he could follow  _ anything, anywhere. _ Desi’s never had the skill to track like Jack, even though she’s passably good at it. 

There’s a loud splash from behind her, and she turns around to see MacGyver struggling back to his feet in the water. He must have lost his footing on the rain-slick rocks she and Jack used to cross the stream. It wasn’t deep, but Desi hates wet shoes. Not that they aren’t already fairly soaked. 

Desi turns around and hauls him out of the creek bed.  _ Great, he is just as clumsy as I suspected. _ Then again, she should probably cut him some slack, he got falsely arrested last night, and spending the night in a cell anywhere is no bed of roses. And neither is thinking you’re responsible for someone’s death. 

She turns back to Jack. “How are we looking?”

“Well, he’s definitely injured. Limping leaning right.” Jack frowns. “I haven’t seen any blood, and his stride isn’t dragging too badly, so I’d guess it’s a pretty minor issue. Probably not currently dying. But that isn’t gonna matter if those soldiers find him before we do.” He glances at MacGyver as he joins them, arms crossed over his chest and shivering slightly. “What happened, kiddo?”

“Slipped.” 

“You gonna be okay? You want my jacket?”

“I should be fine if we keep walking.” MacGyver says. “How close are we?”

“To that village? Probably less than one klick now,” Jack says, standing up. “Guess we keep moving.” 

When they emerge from the trees, Jack steps back with a hissed curse, throwing out an arm to stop Desi and MacGyver. He puts a finger to his lips and points out into the street, where a canvas back military truck is just slowing to a stop. 

“Do you think Reese is still here?” Desi asks.  _ If I crashed in enemy territory I’d assume I was being hunted and stay as far away as possible from any potentially populated areas. _

Jack frowns. “That depends. Reese is a pilot, not a foot soldier. He doesn’t have the same ground ops tactical experience you and I do, so he’s not going to do what we would. I wouldn’t stay long in a place like this, but I also can’t tell how badly he’s injured. If it’s internal he might have figured his best bet was to try and find a local medical facility.” 

“This town is almost abandoned,” Desi whispers back. “I don’t think there is a doctor here.” 

Jack nods. “Personally, I’d take my chances in the woods. But Reese is a Chicago kid, born and raised. Spent all his life in different cities. He probably feels safer surrounded by buildings. Now it’s just a matter of figuring out which of these buildings he’d choose.”

“Okay, Sherlock, dazzle me with your brilliance,” Desi says.  _ It is not fun trying to be the lighthearted one on this op. _ That’s normally Jack’s job, but he’s over here in some sort of funk, and MacGyver is being...well, just as withdrawn and nervous as she’s gotten used to. 

She gets that they got off on the wrong foot but this is getting a little ridiculous. 

“Well, there’s five abandoned buildings here, but only two that back up onto the woods...and only one with the door closed firmly.” Jack points to what looks like a boarded up restaurant. “Dollars to donuts that’s where he’s holed up.” 

“So how are we going to sneak in there with those soldiers searching the town?” Desi asks. “We can’t afford to draw attention to him.”

“I think I have a plan,” MacGyver says. “How do you feel about climbing trees?”

A few minutes later, they’re pulling a second story window out of a rotting casement and stepping into what looks like an apartment that probably belonged to the owners of the restaurant. 

Desi frowns at the sight of a home abandoned in a hurry. Clothing is still laid out on a bed, moth eaten and moldering. A child’s doll is tucked into the corner of a small three-legged chair. Dishes are spread out on a counter, with the evidence of mice inside and around them. She turns away and follows MacGyver and Jack to the stairwell. 

The stairs are warped, and they creak underfoot as the team walks down. Desi glances around the empty space, trying to decide if anything inside is enough cover to hide their missing pilot, when someone slams into her from behind, throwing her forward. She catches her balance quickly, spinning around to confront her attacker.

The man is holding a broken table leg like a baseball bat. “Who are you, and what are you doing here?”

“Stop! Reese! It’s just me, it’s Dalton.” Jack catches the man’s arm, reaching for the table leg. 

“Jack?”

“Yeah, man. It’s me.”

“What are you doing here?” Reese asks, grimacing when Jack lets go of his arm. 

“Saving your ass.” Jack says with a grin. “We weren’t just gonna let you disappear out here.” 

“Not that I’m not glad to see you, but you shouldn’t be here. Hell,  _ I  _ shouldn’t be here,” Reese says. 

“We know, we came anyway,” Jack says.

“I am so sorry,” MacGyver whispers. “I didn’t think the LIDAR would overload the jet…”

“I’m still alive, don’t think any permanent damage done,” Reese says. “So don’t sweat it, kid, I’m not mad.” He shrugs and then grimaces.

“What hurts?” MacGyver asks.

“Shoulder. Think I cracked my collarbone.” Reese nods to his left arm. 

MacGyver reaches up and runs a hand over the bone. “Yeah, you definitely broke it,” He says. “Hold on a second, you don’t want to make it worse.” He reaches for a pile of old tablecloths sitting in a half-open cabinet and starts ripping one apart. 

“What are you doing?” Desi asks.

“Making a brace. Moving any more could potentially displace his collarbone. Right now it’s still in place, so if we keep it there, it won’t get worse.” He’s tying scraps of cloth together into some kind of thing that looks almost like the harness Desi uses when she walks Carlo. “Okay, Reese, I’m going to need you to put your good arm through here...and now this is the tricky one, I’m sorry.”

Desi hears Reese bite back a groan as he maneuvers his arm into the sling, and a sigh of relief as MacGyver finishes adjusting it.

“We’re gonna have company real soon,” Jack says, stepping back from the boarded window and glancing around the room. He picks up a heavy beam and lays it in place in the two metal hooks in the doorframe. “Wood’s rotting out. That door isn’t gonna hold them for long.”

“Out the windows?” Desi asks.

“They’re barred,” Reese offers before Desi can even start trying to pry away the boards. “And that rear door is locked or stuck or something. I couldn’t get out of it.” 

MacGyver frowns. “Well, we can’t go out the way we came in, Reese won’t be able to make it down the tree and I can’t make something to lower him soon enough.” He glances around the room again, then stops and rests his hand on a water spigot in the wall. “Wait, do you still have the whole emergency kit from the plane?”

“Yes,” Reese says. “Wasn’t sure what I might need, so…”

“I need you to break out the emergency raft.” MacGyver pulls a roll of slightly soggy duct tape from his pants pocket. “Jack, Desi, see if you can find some sort of tubing or hose.” He unrolls the self-inflating life raft, and then immediately cuts off the valve end. The whole thing deflates again with a puff that stirs dust off the floor.

“Will this do?” Desi asks, holding up a coil of garden hose.

“Yes, perfect,” MacGyver says. “Jack, I need you to shove the door open as far as you can and tuck the end of the raft through to the outside. Desi, screw the end of that hose to that faucet if you can.” He takes the other end from her and sticks it into the hole left in the raft from cutting out the valve, wrapping duct tape around and around the joining. 

“Mac, are you planning on fighting them with a really big water balloon?” Jack asks. “Because although that would be pretty awesome, I think they have guns. And I think those are a little more dangerous.”

“No. I’m going to use it to force that door open,” MacGyver says. “Filling the raft with water will exert more force than filling it with just air. Hopefully, enough to snap off that lock. Desi, turn on the water.” 

She does, watching as the raft slowly fills. There’s a sudden pounding on the door, and she jumps, drawing her gun from her waist. “This better work fast, that door won’t hold long.”

“It will,” MacGyver says, but she hears him whisper under his breath, ‘come on, please work’.

Just then, there’s a rending sound of wood cracking, and the door falls open. 

“Go!” Jack shouts, pushing MacGyver and Reese ahead of him. Desi brings up the rear, letting the woods close in behind them just as she hears a final crash of the restaurant's door bar splintering. 

Reese chuckles. 

“Never thought a raft would save my life on dry land.”

Desi shakes her head and tucks her gun back in her belt. “Guys, before we get too far...the jeep’s  _ this _ way.” 

… 

ON THE ROAD AGAIN

“I am so, so sorry.” Mac can’t stop apologizing, the words tripping over themselves. He still can’t quite believe that this is true, that Reese is alive and well.

“Listen, man, not your fault, okay?” Reese says, grimacing as he shifts in his seat. “I’m a test pilot. I know the risks every time I go up. And what are the chances that  _ all _ the jet’s safety features would conk out at once?”

“Uh...astronomically low.” Now that Mac can in some way think straight again, his mind has been coming to the same conclusion. There should be no way that the LIDAR caused every single system on the jet to fail. There are redundancies built in to prevent that kind of thing, even if one of the normally installed systems goes haywire. 

“I see your brain chewin’ on something,” Jack says. “What’s cookin’ there hoss?”

“Well, like Reese said, the jet shouldn’t have just died like that. Not even if the LIDAR drew off all the dedicated power. There’s a backup system that should have kicked in and didn’t.” 

“Why would that happen?” Desi asks. “That doesn’t sound like a hardware issue.”

“No, it doesn’t.” Mac still isn’t used to Desi’s electrical engineering knowledge. It’s weird to hear her talking in sync with his thoughts.  _ Instead of purposefully misinterpreting or pretending not to know things like Jack does, she’s keeping up with me. _ It’s a different feeling, but not wholly unwelcome. It’s even different than things with Riley. She tends to show how smart she is too, but hers is tech savvy that has Mac just as lost as he’s sure he makes Jack feel sometimes.  _ I was never good with that side of computers. _

“There’s supposed to be automated controls that switch the systems over instantly,” Reese says. “By the time I realized they weren’t kicking in and tried to manually override and engage them, it was too late, I was already going to eat dirt.” 

“See, I’m telling you, all these smart systems are gonna kill us,” Jack says. “This is why I still drive the classics. No freaky onboard computer to screw up and kill me. Rise of the machines, man, mark my words. Manual is always gonna beat computerized when it comes to things like that.” 

“After today I might agree with you,” Reese says.

“Never thought I’d see the day  _ you _ of all people decided I was right to eschew new tech,” Jack says, then grins when Mac raises his eyebrows at the use of the uncharacteristic word. “What? It was ‘word of the day’ on that email thing, and Diane wants to play Scrabble at the next game night, so I’m brushing up.” 

“Jack Dalton subscribed to ‘word of the day’?” Desi asks, chuckling. “This I need to see.” 

“I think I got the LIDAR’s signal back,” Mac says. “Jack, call Riley for me will you? I used my phone to fix this.”

“Better yours than mine,” Jack says, dialing. “Hey Ri. You got your rig with you?”

There’s an affirmative ‘hm-um’ as Jack switches the phone to speaker.

Mac leans forward. “We’re gonna upload the LIDAR data to you, see if you can figure out what went wrong.”

“Okay, standing by to receive transmission,” Riley says.

“You sound cheerful,” Mac says. “If you’re quoting Star Wars at me, things must be going well back home.”

“We got a lead on the SWATter,” Riley says. “Matty sent Bozer with a team to pick him up from his job, and with any luck we’ll have some answers in a few hours.”

“That’s good,” Jack says.

“Yeah, and good news is, I don’t think he’s connected to any of our really shady friends. It looks like his brother was a cartel member you helped put away, and he decided to settle the score.” 

Mac sighs and runs a hand through his hair in relief.  _ It felt so much like it was Murdoc, playing his sick mind games again. _ Today sounds like it’s going to end a lot better than it started. That is, if they can figure out what happened to Reese’s plane. 

“Damn.” Riley’s voice is a whisper. “No wonder that jet had issues.” 

“What?” Mac asks. 

“Well, first of all, this software is totally corrupted.”

“What?”

“Yeah, it’s a mess. Someone tried to upload a virus and crash the LIDAR, but the code is super buggy. Instead of just turning off the LIDAR it infected the jet’s whole control module and sent all its safety protocols offline too.”

“That’s not right,” Mac says. “You checked that code for me right before we installed the LIDAR.”

“I know. This happened after. According to the system logs, this update was made an hour before Reese took off.” 

“Someone at the airfield would have to have done it,” Reese says. “No one updates a device like that so close to testing...there was someone hanging around the hangar bay when I got there. He wasn’t one of the mechanics I recognized, but we get new people all the time, I didn’t think about it.”

“I’m going to try and pull footage from the hangar, see if we can ID this guy,” Riley says. “In the meantime, can you think of why someone would want to sabotage the LIDAR?”

“I think the answer to that might be on the LIDAR itself,” Mac says. “Whoever wanted to shut it down probably didn’t want it to get a look at whatever it was about to start mapping.” 

“Well, there are a few seconds of data that it captured before the system crashed. Those are corrupted too, but let me work my magic,” Riley says. 

Mac listens to her tapping away on the keys on her end of the call, then hears her small ‘gotcha’. A text pings on Jack’s phone, it’s a series of images. Jack starts scrolling through them, then stops on one that looks like it’s full of long cylinders, stacked around a deep pit. 

“Whoa, who’s digging up the Ark of the Covenant out here.” 

“What are those things?” Reese asks.

“Chemical weapons,” Desi says with a shudder. “Those canisters are probably white phosphorus.” She glances at Jack. “During the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan a couple decades ago, there was a lot of chemical weapons use. After the war, huge quantities were unaccounted for. Unscrupulous arms dealers have been finding caches for years. One of the groups I was undercover with in ‘12 had a warehouse full of cylinders just like that.” 

“Could it be the same people?” Mac asks. 

Desi shakes her head. “Ripped that operation out by the roots and accounted for eighty percent of the weapons they were dealing. There’s way too many in that photo to be whatever we didn’t seize. Someone found another cache. This area is a crossroads of major conflict hotspots. It’s a great place for an illegal weapons dealer to set up shop.” 

“And they were willing to go to great lengths to protect it,” Mac says. “But how would anyone even know that the LIDAR was going to be tested here? It’s not like random weapons dealers have the Phoenix test pilot schedule.” 

“Yeah, that’s a real good question, best answered when we are safely back stateside,” Jack says. “I doubt the border crossings will be very easy right now. Especially in a stolen military jeep that the army is probably looking for.”

“I don’t think we’re even going to make it to the border,” Desi says suddenly, glancing from the rearview to the side mirror. “We have incoming. And they definitely already spotted us.”

… 

“Do we have a plan for losing these guys?” Jack asks, looking back to see the rapidly approaching SUV. It doesn’t look military. It’s black, under a coating of road dust and mud, and while it has a pushbar on the front, it looks more like something Jack would expect to see stateside. 

“Well, that’s a lot bigger than we are and not made to go off-road. We’ll lose them in the woods.” Desi is laser focused on the road ahead. “I’m going to aim for that gap in the trees up there, as long as everyone’s braced for one more rough ride. I know where there’s a spot we should be able to cross the border, not too far from here. As long as it’s still the way it was a few years ago, we should be set.” 

“Sounds good. Do it.” Jack grabs the handle above the door, and glances back to make sure Mac and Reese are settled in as well as they can be. 

Desi floors the accelerator, and the jeep rattles down the rough road. She yanks the wheel hard to the side, and they bounce off the packed gravel, onto grass. Just as suddenly, though, the vehicle comes to a jolting halt that slams Jack forward into the dashboard. He hears Reese groan in pain when the movement jars his shoulder. 

“Damn it!” Desi snaps, gunning the accelerator and shifting rapidly between reverse and drive. “There was a ditch hidden in all that long grass. We’re stuck.” 

“Can you get it out?” Mac asks. Jack frowns, the kid’s got blood on his forehead. He must have hit hard. 

“If I had time for us to get out and push, but we don’t.” 

Jack glances behind them. Desi’s burst of speed let them outpace the SUV temporarily, but now the vehicle is gaining fast. Jack turns to Desi with a grin he’s pretty sure is born of insane desperation. 

“Hey Dez, you want to play it like Malaysia?”

“Hell yeah.” She grins. 

“What’s Malaysia?” Reese asks.

“Just watch.” Jack chuckles. “And...you and Mac are gonna need to lie low. Kinda literally.”

What feels like seconds later, Jack and Desi are side by side under the jeep. “I cannot believe I’m crawling through the mud with you again,” Desi mutters. 

Jack just grins, watching as the other vehicle skids to a stop, and the doors slam. Two pairs of combat boots walk up to the vehicle. The moment they’re in striking range, clearly puzzled by the empty jeep, Jack reaches out and grabs the ankles of the guy closest to him, while Desi does the same to hers. Both of them scramble out from under the car, knocking out their startled pursuers, who are both wearing thick black ski masks. 

“One each. That’s fair, right?” Jack says. “We’re still tied from back at the crash site.” 

Desi dusts off her muddy hands on her pants. “Sounds fair to me. MacGyver, Reese, you can come out now.”

The two of them emerge from under the back of the small jeep, brushing themselves off. There’s mud and what looks like a few burrs tangled in Mac’s hair, and Reese looks too pale. Crawling around under there probably didn’t do his shoulder any favors. But at least he’s alive. 

“Well, whoever these guys are, they are not Armenian military,” Mac says. “So why are they chasing us?”

“That’s the million dollar question. Let me get a picture and send it to Riley for facial rec,” Jack says. Desi pulls off the man’s ski mask and frowns.

“No need. That’s Rick Cooley. CIA.”

“Wait, these guys are CIA?” Mac asks. “Why are they hunting us? If we aren’t supposed to be in-country, what are they even doing here?”

Desi frowns. “When I was based here, there was a listening post just over the border. That’s where I made my evidence dead drops every time I got something actionable on the weapons dealers I was inserted with. It’s a pretty shitty posting though, no one ever volunteers for it. It’s kind of a punishment. Cooley probably did something to get himself in trouble with the brass. Not that I’m surprised. He had a rep.”

“Still doesn’t explain what he’s doing on this side of the border with his pal over here. You know him too?” Jack asks, pulling off the second man’s mask as well.

“No, but I’d be willing to bet he’s CIA too.” 

Jack snaps a picture and sends it off to Riley. A few minutes later his phone chimes with a text.

“You were right. He’s CIA, from your listening post. And...as a matter of fact, an agency-wide bulletin apparently just went out this morning, it’s been over twenty-four hours since that post last made contact with the CIA headquarters. They’ve stopped transmitting and according to Riley, security footage shows that the place is deserted. A ten man crew just up and vanished.”

“Well, we’ve now accounted for two of them,” Desi says. “I’m sure the rest can’t be far.”

“Actually, we’ve accounted for three,” Riley says. “I got the security logs from Reese’s airfield. A maintenance tech who supposedly signed in was found in his home, bound and gagged, an hour ago by his girlfriend. The signature on the paper is nothing like his, but it matches one of the agents in question almost perfectly. And while he’s wearing a hat and avoiding turning his face to any cameras while he’s working on Reese's plane, I had Friar compare his gait and posture to the security footage from the CIA base, and there’s a match.”

“So these guys sabotaged my plane? Why?” Reese asks.

“A lot of information about very big operations comes through that post,” Desi says. “Someone probably reported discovery of that chemical weapons cache, and the post probably sent back a report that they’d sent in a black strike team and taken care of it. But they just drove out whoever else found it and decided to make bank.” 

There’s a crackling sound, and all of them jump before realising it’s coming from one of the men’s belts, from a little walkie. 

“Riley, these guys have radios,” Jack says. “I’m gonna answer, okay? See if you can pinpoint where the signal’s coming from.”

“On it. Just keep him on the line for a couple minutes.”

“Okay. One detention-wing-break-in-Han-Solo impression coming up.” Jack picks up the radio, deeply grateful they’ve managed to ID these guys first. 

“This is Cooley. All clear here.”

“Hey, man, I told you, no real names. Go with the code, remember? And what about that jeep?” the voice on the other end asks. 

“False alarm. Just a government patrol.”

“Hey, man, you alright? You sound kinda...off.”

“Yeah, I’m fine. We’re all fine here. How are you?” Jack grimaces.  _ Damn it, why do I always revert to that dialogue on these things? _ He doesn’t even consciously do it. It’s just force of habit. 

“You sure? Repeat your callsign.” 

“I got a location lock!” Riley says.

Jack shuts off the radio and drops it, smashing it under his boot. “Good. Didn’t want to talk to him anyway. ‘Luke, we’re gonna have company’.” 

“At least you didn’t tell him there was a reactor leak,” Mac chuckles. 

“He  _ still _ quotes Star Wars insufferably?” Desi asks.

“You just don’t appreciate the classics,” Jack says. “I’m telling you, Star Wars and Die Hard are part of a well-rounded cultural education. Just because you prefer art films where everyone sits around and looks at each other and says psychologically profound things does not mean your taste in film is any more cultured than mine.” He shakes his head. “I thought your taste in movies was weird, and then I met Mac, who unironically enjoys watching three hours documentaries of grass growing.” He chuckles. “The things I put up with for you people. Honestly.” 

He starts walking back toward the jeep when he hears jangling keys and turns around to see Desi spinning a key ring around her finger. “You can take that stinky old jeep if you want, but I’m riding in style.” 

…

DIG SITE

IT DOES LOOK LIKE RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK

SADLY JACK IS RIGHT

Desi crouches beside the rest of her team behind a tangle of barbed wire fencing, watching the scurry of movement between canvas tents and stacks of bright yellow canisters. Several men are loading the canisters into stake-back trucks. 

“Well, that’s definitely  _ no bueno, _ ” Jack says. “Guess when I hit them with my Han Solo bit, they decided to pull up stakes.”

“And if they drive out of here right now with those weapons, we won’t be able to catch them in time,” Desi says. “The next time we see those canisters, it’s going to be at the site of an attack.” She shudders. She’s seen up close and personal the damage white phosphorus can do.  _ I heard my parents’ stories about how horrible it was in Vietnam, but I never really understood until I saw what it did to those villages in Georgia _ . She doesn’t want to be responsible for letting that happen again.  _ Orders were to maintain my cover until we took down the Black Flag’s leader. But I regret it every single day. I hate the fact that I drove one of those weapons trucks. I may have just been pretending to be one of those monsters, but there is blood on my hands because of it. And that will never go away.  _ “We can’t let them leave with those weapons.” 

There are at least eight people here, too many for her and Jack to take out quickly.  _ And if even one of those trucks makes it out of here, hundreds of people could die.  _

“I might be able to disable the trucks if you and Jack handle the guards,” MacGyver says. “Think you can handle that?”

Jack nods. “Ready for a rematch, Nguyen?”

She fistbumps him. “Absolutely.” 

“You’ll need to take them out fast and quietly,” MacGyver insists.

“Yeah, kid, we will. We got this, go do your mechanical genius thing, okay?” Jack says. “Be careful out there. Those trucks are the center of activity. You sure you’ll be okay?”

“They’re not looking underneath them,” MacGyver says, reaching out to start clipping the barbed wire surrounding the camp with his knife. “I’ll be in and out before they know what hit them. Once the trucks are disabled I’ll signal you and we can deal with the rest of these guys. Reese, you stay here and call Matty Webber. Tell her exactly what’s going on, she’ll find a way to work it out.”

“I feel kind of useless,” Reese protests. “You guys are all about to risk your necks.”

“Yeah, well, you risked yours enough for one day,” Jack says. “Just stay put. I already thought I was gonna have to hand your wife a folded flag. Don’t make me do it.” Reese just nods and takes the phone from Jack.

As far as plans go, Desi thinks this is actually a pretty sound one. As soon as they can be reasonably sure that the men can’t drive their deadly cargo out to another location, they won’t have to rely on the element of surprise.

Once they’re through the fence, Desi goes one way while Jack goes the other. She ducks under the canvas edge of one of the tents, crouching behind a makeshift table made from crates near the back. There’s no one inside, but there is a large pile of cylinders out front, and two different men are going back and forth between them and the trucks.

She turns around, moving the back of the tent just enough to see if the guard walks past. When he does, she slips out, steps up behind him, then cups a hand over his mouth while pinching a nerve in his neck. He goes down silently, and she ducks back behind a stack of boxes to listen for the whistle MacGyver promised to use as his signal once the trucks were out of commission. 

She hears shouting, and looks up from behind the crates just in time to see two of the men dragging MacGyver out into the middle of the camp. He’s covered in mud, like they pulled him right out from under whatever vehicle he was caught in the act of disabling. 

He’s struggling to stumble to his feet, it looks like whoever’s pulling him has a grip on both his jacket collar and his hair.  _ Damn, that’s got to hurt. _ Desi’s had her own hair used against her more than a few times, and it’s never a pleasant experience.

MacGyver kicks and struggles as much as he can, but it doesn’t do him any good, and just pisses off the man holding him, so much so that the guy turns around and slams a fist into the kid’s cheek. 

“Cooley said there was more than one person in that jeep before he went dark. Where’s your friends, huh?” The man holding MacGyver asks. The kid spits blood onto the ground and stays stubbornly silent, earning himself another punch. 

Desi hears the click of a gun being readied beside her, and turns to see Jack, his face stony. He taps her on the shoulder and points out to the left, then takes a determined step forward before she grabs him by the coat and drags him back down behind the crates of weapons. He looks pissed enough to shoot  _ her. _

“What the hell Dez? He’s in trouble!” 

“Jack, if you run out there you’re going to get him shot. We need a better plan.” Desi says. “I get that you’re worried about him, but they need him alive as long as they know there’s more of us. So let’s use that in our favor.”

She’s never seen Jack completely lose his cool like this. She’s seen him determined to get their people home at all costs, she’s seen him turn into a raging man bent on vengeance when he’s lost a teammate. But this...he was going to throw himself into a clearly deadly rain of potential crossfire because MacGyver got himself into trouble. 

She glances over the crates again, and when the man holding the gun on MacGyver turns to scan the area, she catches a full on look at his face.  _ Well, well, well. Should have known you’d turn coat.  _

She turns back to Jack. “That’s John Symons. CIA special operations, demoted for an op that went south in Bahrain three years ago. Probably why he got transferred here.” Desi remembers the buzz around the agency involving that op. She was surprised the man didn’t get court-martialed right then and there. And it’s given her an idea.

“Jack, I have a plan. It’s...kind of crazy though. Do you trust me?” She isn’t sure he will, she’s going to be holding MacGyver’s life in her hands, literally, and any miscalculation will get them both killed. 

“Just do it.” Jack’s fingers are white-knuckled around his gun. “Get him out of there.” 

She nods, grabs one of the large yellow canisters off the pile beside them, and walks out calmly into the middle of the camp, even as every gun in the place is suddenly turned on her. 

She holds the canister in front of her, her gun pressed to the top, finger resting loosely on the trigger. “Shoot me, and this goes off. You know what’s in here, right?”

The man frowns. 

MacGyver smiles, despite the blood on his face and the hand in his hair, he’s clearly caught on to the plan. 

“This is white phosphorus. The second this canister is breached, the phosphorus will ignite on contact with air. Just one of these canisters is enough to vaporize all of us. But if you’re not convinced, it would ignite and explode every one of those other canisters too. All that would be left of us would be a burned-out crater.” 

“You’re bluffing,” the man holding the gun to MacGyver’s head snarls. “You won’t pull the trigger.”

“Not if you don’t,” Desi says. “But there is someone who will be very pissed at me if I don’t come home with that kid there, and I think I’d actually prefer dying in a flash of light to facing him and having failed. So pull that trigger, we all die.” She can tell the man still looks unconvinced. She’s going to have to sell this a little harder. “Unlike you, Symons, I’m not a coward.” Desi says. “I know who you are. I was CIA too. And I saw the reports from Bahrain. You left your whole team to die. That’s why you got demoted and stuck out here at a listening post. I know you don’t want to die. That’s why you won’t risk shooting him, or having your men shoot me. If you really didn’t care, you’d have opened fire and I’d be swiss cheese right now.” She shrugs. “And also incinerated, but…beside the point. So hand him over and we can all go home with what we want. Me with the kid, you with your life.” 

Symons growls, but then shoves MacGyver forward. “Go on. Take him. Get outta here.” 

MacGyver stumbles to his feet, walking over to Desi.

“I really hope you got all the trucks disabled before they caught you,” She hisses. 

He nods. “They’re not going anywhere,” He whispers back.

“Good. Then let’s get out of here before they figure that out.”

… 

PHOENIX HOLDING CELLS

“Will someone please explain to me what the hell is happening?” 

Riley frowns at the man cuffed to the table across from her. She can’t find it in her to have much sympathy.  _ Sucks to be arrested and marched off without warning, doesn’t it? _ She could have come in and done this interrogation half an hour ago, but she wanted to give this guy a taste of what he did to her and her family.  _ I know, kind of petty of me. But Mac is traumatized all over again because of what he did. _

“You’re here because of this.” She pulls her phone out of her pocket, opens a recording, and presses play. It’s the call made to police dispatch last night. The one that got Mac’s house stormed by a bunch of men with guns and handcuffs. 

When it’s over, she looks up at him.

“Was that you?”

“Yes, but…” He sighs. “I did what I had to do.”

“What does that mean?” Riley asks. “Why did you have to do this?”

“I can’t tell you that.” He looks genuinely conflicted and upset. 

“Jorge, you could be arrested and charged with falsifying a report of terrorism,” Riley says. “If you don’t want to tell us what you did, I can pick up that phone and call the police right now.”

“I didn’t know it was fake. He sounded scared.”

“Who did?”

“The boy.”

“Boy?” Riley asks.

Jorge nods. “I was waiting for the bus, and this kid with a hoodie and backpack ran up to me. He said he was scared to go home because there was a man who lived next door who was making things that blew up.” Jorge says. “He told me he was afraid to tell anyone in case the man hurt him. So I told him to tell me everything he knew, and I’d call the police for him, so no one had to know.” 

It sounds like he’s telling the truth.  _ No one would make up a story this convoluted and bizzare.  _ “Can anyone corroborate this?”

“Yes.” Jorge looks suddenly worried. “She...ah...I was meeting her…”

Riley gets the picture.  _ His file says he’s married, and also that he lives in a totally different part of town than where he was getting on that bus. It’s nowhere near his job either.  _ He was meeting a mistress for an illicit tryst. She must have walked him to his stop. 

“Give me her name and number. And go call your wife when you leave.” Riley says. “I’ll know if you don’t.”

“I…”

“Would you rather go to prison?” Riley asks. “Just do it.”

Five minutes later she’s walking out with a phone number and an assurance that Jorge will come clean to his family about his affair.  _ Maybe I shouldn’t have pushed the envelope like that, but I hate seeing a man get away with cheating on his family.  _

“Damn,” Bozer says when he meets her at the door. “You’re cold.”

“When it comes to my family, I’ll do whatever it takes to protect them. Or at least get justice.” Riley hands him the phone number. “Call her. I think his story’ll check out, but I want to confirm it. And see if you can get a description of the child from her. Something about that seems really wrong.”

“About a kid asking for help?” Bozer asks. 

“Don’t you think that’s an awfully detailed way for a kid to explain a situation?” Riley says. “I mean, asking someone else to call and report something so you don’t get hurt...that doesn’t seem like ten-year-old logic. And why a total stranger? Is ‘stranger danger’ not a thing anymore?” 

“I don’t know,” Bozer says. “Mama taught us kids a lot about how to protect ourselves, from the time we were old enough to talk. She told us what we should say and not say, to other people, to the cops. Because where we grew up there were a lot of gangs, and if the wrong things got back to the wrong people, things got messy. Maybe this kid came from a bad neighborhood before his family moved. He talked to someone he knew was in no way connected, who wouldn’t know him from Adam, so this couldn’t blow back on him.” 

Riley frowns. “I still don’t like it. This doesn’t sit right with me.”

“Me neither. But there’s nothing we can do for now.” 

… 

THE PHOENIX JET

FINALLY

“I’m okay,” Mac mumbles, fending off Jack’s hands as they try to swipe more antiseptic over his split lip. “It’s just superficial.”

“You almost got killed. I’m allowed to fuss.” Jack sighs, hands stilling. “Kiddo, I’m sorry about today.”

“Literally none of this was your fault,” Mac says, his voice sounding off from his swollen mouth. 

“Yeah, well, none of it was your fault either. I’m sorry I lost my temper earlier.”

“How many times have you apologized for that now?” Mac asks, smiling and then grimacing as fresh blood runs down his lip. 

“Good news, guys,” Desi says, stepping out of the cockpit, where she must have placed the plane on autopilot. “Matty says authorities rounded up Symons and his whole team at the weapons dig. Apparently he wasn’t willing to skip out on a payday and was still trying to repair whatever the hell MacGyver did to the trucks when they got there.” 

“You…you can just call me Mac,” Mac says softly. “My name...it’s kind of a mouthful.” 

_ And it doesn’t mean anything good to you. _ Jack reaches out and squeezes his shoulder gently.  _ That’s the name he connects to his father, to his arrest. To everything bad that’s ever happened to him. Murdoc calls him that, when he isn’t calling him ‘Angus’ or another pet name. _

Jack’s honestly a little surprised Mac didn’t want to take  _ his _ name when he was finally adopted. But he thinks he might know why.  _ He’s trying to redeem that name. To make it more than his father’s legacy. To prove that  _ he’s  _ more than his father’s legacy.  _

“Okay, Mac.” Desi says.  _ She was probably waiting for permission to use the nickname his friends do.  _ Jack knows  _ she _ hates to be called ‘Dez’ unless it’s by someone she’s expressly told is allowed to do so. She probably thought Mac had the same hang-up.

“Well, there’s the update. I’m going back up front,” Desi says.  _ She still isn’t much for socializing with us, but we’ll work on that. _

Jack sits down beside Mac, who leans on his shoulder, and settles in snugly beside him. Jack smiles when the kid’s breathing evens out and deepens. He can finally get some sleep.

Mac wakes up just before they land in L.A., and he’s still rubbing his eyes and yawning when they taxi to a stop.

When they all walk out, Reese’s family is waiting for them, next to Matty. The kids yell with delight and run to the stairs as Reese hurries down to meet them, his arm now in a proper sling. They latch onto his legs, and his wife wraps him in a hug. 

“Hey, hey, guys.” 

Jack smiles at the sight of the reunited family, and slings his arm around Mac’s shoulders, while the two of them walk down to meet the others. 

“Thank you,” Rose says as she finally lets go of her husband, walking up to Jack and Mac and Desi. “I can’t believe you brought him back to us.”

Mac says nothing, and when Jack turns to him he sees that the kid is crying. Which is apparently cue for Rose to smother him in a massive motherly hug, and for the children to follow suit. 

Mac smiles as the kids both hug him. Jack breathes a small sigh of relief at the sight of his kid finally relaxing.  _ It was one hell of a day. But at least it’s ending well. _

…

BOZER AND LEANNA’S APARTMENT

The apartment feels cozy, even with rain beating on the windows outside. Some part of it will always remind Bozer of Jack, and that gosh awful Telly Savalas painting, but Leanna’s taken the place and made it theirs. 

Bozer glances at a framed photo of them, an outtake from their ‘wedding pictures’ for that op in France last year. It was part of their ‘engagement’ set, so they aren’t wearing formal clothes, and they just look happy and relaxed. 

Which is far from what Bozer is feeling right now. He can’t live with this weird secret tension any longer. He couldn’t even really eat tonight, despite the fact that he’d made one of the meals they’ve both agreed is a shared favorite. 

“So...What’s on your mind?” Bozer asks, rubbing his thumbs gently against Leanna’s shoulder blades, standing behind her chair while she reads a stack of intel reports. “You’ve been kind of distant all week, and you are way too tense, babe.” He tries not to let too much worry bleed into his tone. 

“I’ve been trying to figure out how to say this.” Leanna says, shrugging out from under his hands and turning to face him. 

“Oh my God, are we having a baby? I didn’t think...wait…have you been going to the doctor when you said you had those meetings?” Bozer’s mind is whirring, trying to put pieces together. He thought they were being careful, but maybe...

“No, no, Bozer. It isn’t that.” He’s shocked at how disappointed the thought makes him.  _ As much as I’m totally not sure I’m ready for parenthood, I...I guess I’m more ready than I thought. _

“Is it your family? Is everyone okay?”

She nods, but her face is serious and her eyes are sad. “It’s...no one’s dying, Boze. But it...it would be a big change.”

His stomach sinks. Whatever it is doesn’t sound good. Not at all. He thought they were doing well. He’d even been contemplating proposing this summer, when they were going to go spend her family’s vacation with them in Virginia. 

“Bozer, there’s an undercover position. In Mumbai. One year.” 

“And you want to take it.”

She bites her lip, looking at the floor and then him. “I speak Marathi. And this...Bozer, a cover like this is a career maker.” 

He nods. He can’t get words to come out.  _ Undercover for a year. We might not even be able to talk.  _

She puts her hand over his. “Bozer, I’m not ready to settle down. Not yet. And trying to force it, well, it wouldn’t be fair to either of us. I’d spend the rest of my life wondering what could have been, and you’d spend the rest of yours knowing I didn’t get to do it. And it wouldn’t be fair to any family we might have started either.”

“Okay.” He’s always known she’s more independent than he is. Less clingy. He doesn’t want to let her go, but she’s right. It wouldn’t be fair to either of them not to let this happen. He thinks maybe he should have seen it coming. 

She must see the crestfallen look on his face. “It’s just a year, Bozer. If we still want each other after that, then we can pick up where we left off. And if life pulls us in different directions…” She sighs. “After what happened to Matty, I don’t want to see that be us. I can’t break your heart later, Bozer. So I’m sorry but I have to break it now.” 

… 

DIANE’S APARTMENT

Jack tosses his duffel bag on the doormat. “Honey, I’m home,” He calls cheerfully. Riley facepalms. 

“Jack.” Diane’s response is half delight, half annoyed groan. She steps up and starts to hug him, then frowns. “What is that  _ smell? _ ”

“Pretty sure the jeep we borrowed had chickens in it at some point,” Mac says. 

“And  _ you!” _ Diane says, resting her hands on his shoulders and turning him side to side like he’s eight years old. “Were you  _ rolling _ in the mud?”

“Crawling around under cars,” Mac says. 

“Both of you need showers.” Diane insists, steering them toward the bathroom. “I’ll get you some clean clothes. Riley stopped by your house on the way home from Phoenix. She says the front door is a total loss.”

“I’ll fix it tomorrow,” Jack says. “Mac, you can shower first. Try not to pass out in there, though, okay?” He’s slightly worried Mac will do just that. The poor kid is still beyond exhausted, even though he slept on the flight home.  _ At least he has the weight of thinking about what happened to Reese off his mind. _ They have a standing invitation for dinner, Rose’s famous gumbo. 

“I won’t.”

“Sing or something, so I know you’re still with me,” Jack says. It’s a trick they worked out when Mac was still majorly averse to being vulnerable, but also not fully recovered from the disaster with Murdoc. Jack would wait outside the bathroom door and listen. Mac actually has a pretty nice shower singing voice. Much better than Jack’s, if he’s being honest. 

By the time they’re both done, dinner, apparently reheated Mexican carry-out, is on the table. Mac’s wearing his own jeans and one of Jack’s sweatshirts and looks fifteen. Riley, in sweats and a messy bun, looks only slightly older. Jack grins at the sight of his family clustered around the dining room table, his kids fighting with plastic forks.

When dinner is over, Riley pulls Mac and Jack aside. “I didn’t want to interrupt everything with Reese and his family earlier, but we brought our SWATter in for questioning...and things got weird.”

“What kind of weird?” Mac asks. Jack puts an arm around his shoulder, pulling him close. 

“This guy claims he was given the tip, and the address, from a child. A child who told him that he was too scared to call the police. Bozer checked it out with a witness who corroborated his story.” 

“Did they have a description of the child?” Jack asks. 

“Not a good one. Just that he was pale and had a hoodie, and was probably about eight to ten. He said he’d heard things blow up and he was scared.”

“Mac, does this sound like a neighborhood kid?” Jack asks. 

“Maybe…” Mac frowns. “But all of them know I invent things. They usually stop by when I’m working on something in the driveway or the front yard, because they’re curious. They usually get more excited than scared about the explosions. It’s the parents I’m always afraid of, I try not to tell the kids  _ all _ the ingredients I use.” 

“Good plan. Well, I guess we’ll have to look into it,” Jack says.

Riley nods. “I’m not sure what happened. And until we figure it out...I think it’s best we all stay here. Diane agrees.”

Jack nods. “It’s probably nothing, but I’d rather be safe than sorry.” He can’t shake the feeling that something is very, very wrong. And from the looks of Mac’s face when he glances down at the kid clinging to his side, Mac feels the same way. 


	18. Seeds+Permafrost+Feather

###  317-Seeds+Permafrost+Feather

PHOENIX LABS

JILL HASN’T PULLED THIS MANY ALL NIGHTERS SINCE COLLEGE

Jill sighs, rubbing her neck. Stress makes the old burn scars hurt, and right now, stress is basically the name of her game.

She can’t decide whether to tell the team or not. With Oversight’s permission, she hasn’t even told Matty.  _ It might be nothing. _ But it might be everything. 

She intercepted the drive more or less by accident. The envelope it was sent in was mangled, she found it in the trash in the mailroom, with Mac’s name, and the drive was automatically rerouted to the labs, since it was loose in the mail.

She hasn’t been able to crack it yet. She should give it to Riley. Riley would work her magic on it. But...the thing is, Jill thinks she knows who sent this anonymous drive. And she’s afraid of what it means for Mac. 

She rests her head against the back of her chair. It’s late, all the other techs have gone home, aside from the two who are conducting a highly sensitive botany experiment in the greenhouse. Jill should be at home too. She should have been home for the past five days. But she’s barely left Phoenix the whole time.  _ Part of it is that I want to be here when the drive decrypts. But I also...don’t want anyone else to stumble across it accidentally.  _ Because Mac has permission to raid her office cabinets for supplies whenever he needs, and telling him that’s now off limits could breed questions she’s not ready to answer.

She needs to crack this encryption as fast as possible. Because the longer this drive remains an unknown variable, the longer whoever sent it has to plan...whatever it is they’re planning.

She runs her fingers through her tangled curls, feeling the roughness of the scars on her cheek and under her hairline. They’re all damaged now, in one way or another. She doesn’t want to see any more happen.

The computer pings, and she jumps, spilling the cup of coffee all over her desk. She ignores the spreading pool of brown liquid and stares at the sudden collection of files on the screen. 

It’s  _ huge _ . A collection of image and video files. Jill glances at the dates. Most of them are datestamped from last year, during the three month period Mac was gone. But...there’s a large video one as recent as a week before the drive showed up in the mailroom, and photos from the  _ day _ before.

She doesn’t want to see the ones from the past. She saw the pictures. She doesn’t need to see anything else. She knows who had to have sent this.  _ Murdoc. _ She already knew it, she just...wanted it not to be true. But now the evidence is right in front of her. She hovers her cursor over the most recent video and clicks on it.

An all too familiar face pops up on screen, against...an all too familiar background.  _ God no. That’s Mac’s...that’s Mac’s HOUSE _ . Jill wants to put a fist through the screen, but it won’t wipe that horrible grin off that face. She can’t touch him. But he can hurt them. 

Murdoc smiles wider, leaning on the dining room table where it looks like he set up whatever is recording this video. His hands are folded in front of him, both index fingers up, and he looks eerily relaxed. She shudders at the sound of his voice when he starts speaking. 

“Have you missed me, Angus? Don’t worry, I’m almost ready for us to meet again. I’m just...getting the place all ready for guests, you see. Because you’re  _ such _ a special one, Angus. I want to make sure everything is just...perfect. I promise, it’s  _ so _ much safer than  _ this _ place; really, I’m just doing you the favor of helping you move.” Murdoc’s smile is eerie, predatory. “I do hope you’re looking forward to this as much as I am.” He shrugs. “I promise, it’ll be fun. Well, I’ve got to go. Finishing touches and all that, you know. Until we meet again, Angus.” The screen goes black.

Jill picks up the desk phone with a shaking hand and calls Oversight. “I’m sorry to disturb you, but there’s something you need to see.” 

* * *

PARIS

THIS IS DEFINITELY NOT A NORMAL STOP ON A TOUR ITINERARY 

“I officially hate you, Dalton.” Desi grumbles, wrapping the emergency blanket around herself a little tighter. 

“No you don’t.” Jack, similarly clad in a neon orange square, grins, teeth startlingly white against the muck on his face and caught in his scruffy beard. 

“Yes, I do. Whose idea was it to dive into the Paris sewers after that guy?”

“Hey, it worked. We won, and he’s not gonna sell any missile system plans to anyone now.” 

Desi resists the urge to punch him. After all, it is only half his fault she’s sitting here on the back of an ambulance, with sewer gunk in her hair and up her nose.  _ I could have stayed behind. _

A moment later, Jack voices it for her. “Who's more foolish, the fool or the fool who follows him?” Jack asks.

She rolls her eyes.  _ Him and his Star Wars obsession.  _ She pretends to be annoyed with it, but she has to admit he is right, the original trilogy is very quotable. “Thank you, Obi-Wan Kenobi, I think I’ve had quite enough of the wonderful new smell we’ve just discovered.” 

“Whoa.” Bozer grimaces as he, Riley, and Mac jog up to the two. “No offense, but...you two stink.” 

“We know,” Jack says just as she does, and they turn to each other and shake their heads.

“For the record this was all Jack’s idea,” Desi says, rolling her eyes. “Which I will be sure to make note of on my report.”

“We caught the guy, didn’t we?” Jack says. “I told you he was going to try to escape through the sewers. It’s...like...a prerequisite for Paris criminals. They have to follow in the time honored tradition of Jean Valjean.”

Bozer raises an eyebrow. “How does Jack Dalton know the plot of  _ Les Mis _ ?”

“Because I sat through the whole show in London, watching a diplomat’s box for him to make an exchange with a target,” Jack replies. “And you only have to see that one once to make an impression.”

“I had no idea you were so appreciative of the theater,” Mac chuckles.

“I love a good story!” Jack says. “ _ Les Miserables  _ is timeless!”

“I know why you love it so much,” Riley says with a chuckle. “You relate to the guy who goes around adopting random kids.” She starts to punch him in the shoulder, then pulls her hand back. “Uh...you need a shower first, old man.”

“Wait, you’re telling me that the whole time, you’d stop cuffing me if I was wearing sewer sludge as cologne?”

Riley groans. “You are incorrigible. Come on, exfil is ready and waiting. Hopefully with full scrubdown facilities.”

“Sounds good to me.” Desi hops off the end of the ambulance. “You don’t think they’re going to want these blankets back now, do you?”

* * *

THE PHOENIX FOUNDATION

THE BEST PLACE TO DROWN YOUR SORROWS IN YOUR WORK

Bozer barely looks up when he hears the click of shoes on the tile floors. He doesn’t want to look at or talk to anyone in the labs right now. He doesn’t want their pity. He wants to pretend the last several months with Leanna never happened at all.

Sparky’s voice cuts into his determined avoidance of a pity party. “I am detecting a pulse rate of one-hundred and thirty-five beats per minute, rapid eye blinking movements, and decreased eye contact with co-workers compared to the observed average. It appears Ms. Morgan is agitated.”

“Jill?” Bozer looks up. Sure enough, Jill’s face has her worried look, the brows pulled together a little too tightly, the lips pressed firmly together.

“Hey, Boze. Matty said to come get you. Said she couldn’t get you on your phone?”

“I shut it off. I’m sorry. She didn’t bite your head off, did she?” He’s trying to avoid the temptation to text a number that is no longer active, to call just to hear Leanna’s cheerful, businesslike voicemail asking him to leave a message at the tone. 

“Not really.” 

Sparky is right. Jill seems off. Really off. Not just ‘got a firm order from Matty the Hun’ off. As a matter of fact, Bozer has seen her still in her office every evening when one of his teammates forcibly drags him out of the lab to go home and eat and sleep.  _ Part of me wants to keep working, but I know killing myself over this isn’t going to end Leanna’s deep cover any sooner. _

He’s been staying in a Phoenix safehouse the last week. He can’t bear to go home to the apartment he and Leanna shared yet, and Mac’s house is still considered unsafe, given the mysterious nature of the SWATting. 

He hasn’t spent a lot of time there, though. He goes home and crashes in bed after spending all evening with Mac’s family.  _ Ironically, now  _ I’m _ the one alone crashing  _ my _ best friend’s family space.  _ Riley’s mom has made home-cooked meals every night, and the last few days he’s felt good enough to help her in the kitchen. He actually bought some of the ingredients to make a casserole tonight, to give Diane a break from cooking. He’s going to leave work early tonight and surprise them all when Jack and Mac and Riley get back from Paris. 

“Are you okay?” Bozer asks. Just because he’s in a black hole doesn’t mean he gets a free pass on ignoring other people and their life issues. He learned that a long time ago. 

“Yeah. I’m fine. Why?”

“I am detecting rapid eye movements, increasingly rapid breathing and pulse, and 2.5 times more lip-biting than typical. Based on this analysis I believe Ms. Morgan is lying.”

“Bozer, why is Sparky analyzing me?” Jill asks. 

“I’ve been trying to program him to recognize human emotions.” Bozer shrugs. 

“Please tell me that’s not going to become some sort of bizarre coping mechanism where you try to create a replacement…”

“No, no, no.” Bozer jumps up so fast he knocks over a jar of pens on the desk. “I’m gonna go see Matty before this conversation becomes any weirder.”

“You do that.”

Bozer switches Sparky off, then hurries up to the War Room, where he’s sure Matty will be waiting. 

She is. Staring out the windows with a worried expression, so absorbed in her thoughts that she jumps when Bozer opens the door. He frowns. Matty is never easy to startle. Jack’s been trying for literal years. 

“You wanted to see me?” He asks, more to cover up Matty’s obvious lack of composure than because he really needs to.

“Yes.”

“I...I really am okay.” Not okay-okay, but post-breakup-okay. He isn’t moping. He isn’t sitting alone in his empty apartment flipping through pictures of him and Leanna together on his phone. No, he’s totally fine. 

“I highly doubt that, Bozer, but that’s not why I asked for you.”

He breathes a tiny sigh of relief. Matty would definitely have cracked his fragile composure if she’d so much as pressed on one of the fault lines. 

“I need your help with something.” She looks at him seriously, her eyes dark with worry. “James is acting...strange.” 

“Strange?”

“The guard on duty last night reported him breaking several of his usual patterns. And that he seemed unusually pleased for someone who’s been held in solitary confinement for months.” She glances at Bozer. “I wouldn’t be as concerned if I hadn’t just heard...well, it’s better that you don’t know, I don’t want him to be able to force your hand at all.”

“Wait, what?”

Matty’s stare is intense. “Leanna was our best interrogator since Cage. But Bozer, you took the same training. See if you can get to the bottom of this.” 

“You want me to pit my spy school skills against one of the most dangerous rogue agents in the world?” Bozer wonders if his voice is squeaking, because he feels like it should be. 

“I trust you, Bozer. And James will underestimate you.” She looks up at him. “Are you up for the challenge?”

“Yes, ma’am.” 

* * *

SOMEWHERE OVER THE ATLANTIC

“I still don’t think that smell is out of my hair,” Desi grumbles, flopping down in the chair across the aisle from Jack.

“I thought girls liked the newest Parisian fragrances,” Jack jokes. “I mean, it could have been something flowery…”

Desi tosses one of the small pillows at him. Riley teased Jack mercilessly about turning into a suburban housewife when he showed up with the bag of them, but even she has to admit they’re much more comfortable to sleep on than the thin little things that came standard with the jet. Jack catches the pillow, fluffs it up, and puts it behind his head. “Thanks, Dez.” 

She rolls her eyes and grabs another pillow, as well as a blanket, from behind the seat in front of her. 

Jack glances down at the table in front of him. The checkerboard is basically at a standstill at this point. He and Mac are just chasing each other’s pieces around the board, and unless one of them makes a really dumb move, they’ll be here all day.

Mac yawns, sliding his piece one square over. Jack can tell it’s a deliberate suicidal move, Mac is ending the game so he can get some sleep. Jack moves his own piece to give Mac’s the perfect opportunity to capture him, giving Mac a wink as he yawns himself. 

Mac shakes his head, reaching forward to make the final move, then grimacing as the jet shifts rather sharply and the board and pieces slide out of his reach. Jack frowns, sitting up a little straighter. 

The screen overhead crackles to life, showing the War Room and Matty’s face.

“Matty, are we getting rerouted?” Mac asks, pushing the blanket pulled up to his shoulders aside and trying to straighten up and look presumably a little more professional. 

“Yes.” Matty says. “You’re all going to Greenland.” 

“Greenland?” Jack asks. “What’s there besides ice and polar bears?”

“The international seed vault,” Matty says.

“The what?” Mac asks.

“It’s a massive international cooperative effort,” Riley explains, looking up from her computer for a moment, she’s probably reading the written briefing. “Countries from all over the world have put aside their differences to create this place. It stores seeds from their regional agriculture so that in case of some devastating impact like war or a blight, they will have seeds from their own native plants to start over with afterward.”

“Sounds like the backdrop for an apocalypse,” Jack says. 

“Well, today, it’s the backdrop for a mystery. One of the security guards, a Carl Adams, has been missing for ten hours.”

“Missing?” Mac asks. “Like he wandered off and got lost in the ice fields missing?” He shivers, Jack guesses he’s remembering Siberia.

“No, as in, he checked in for work but never swiped out missing.” Matty looks worried. “And no security cameras have shown him leaving either. So far, security personnel have been unable to find him in the sweep of the base.”

“And they want us to help look for him?” Desi asks. She looks vaguely annoyed at her attempt at napping being rudely interrupted. 

“Phoenix helped design the seed vault decades ago. They think if anyone knows where Carl might be hiding, it’s us.”

“Yeah, but we weren’t the design team,” Jack says. 

“No, you weren’t. Unfortunately, we can’t ask the actual design consultant for help.” Matty says. Jack gets the sense there’s something she wants to say but isn’t going to, at least not in front of the whole team. “So I’m sending you, since you’re our closest team, and Riley is going to have access to the original schematics we have on file.” She frowns. “This needs to be handled as discreetly as possible. If word got out that there was the chance something in that vault was compromised, the fragile trust between the nations behind it could shatter. There’s a very delicate balance as it is.”

“Understood. Do it fast, do it quietly,” Desi says. 

“Exactly. Best of luck.” Matty switches off the screen, but before she does, Jack sees her subtly adjust one of her earrings. It’s a signal she and Jack had way back in their mutual CIA days. She wants Jack, and only Jack, to turn on comms. Even Riley isn’t aware of that specific signal.

“Well, I guess we can sleep till we get there,” Desi says, laying back against the armrest again. Jack excuses himself, saying he’s going to the bathroom, and once he’s closed the door, he turns on comms.

“Matty, I’m here,” he whispers. “What’s going on?”

“Thank you, Jack.” Matty says. “There’s more to this op than I wanted becoming common knowledge.”

“That sounds ominous, Matty. Thought we were past secrets in this little family.” He doesn’t like the thought of his kids and Desi going in blind to some bigger danger. 

“The original DXS-based designer of that seed vault was James MacGyver, Jack.” He tries not to put a fist through the bathroom mirror.  _ Okay, I see why she handed this the way she did. _ “I didn’t want to tell the team in front of Desi, risk having her start making connections she doesn’t need to. And…I need Mac focused. Not wondering if his father is somehow behind this.” 

Jack sighs, clenching and unclenching his fingers. “Do you think he is?”

“I don’t know. I have Bozer in with him now.”

“Bozer?” Jack practically yells.

“Jack, he’s a trained agent. And James is being closely monitored.” Matty sighs. “Everyone underestimates Bozer.” She’s right, Jack just did. “I don’t expect James to crack for a trained interrogator. Even Cage couldn’t get to him. So I’m trying a different tactic. He’s cocky. Hopefully he’ll start gloating and let something slip.” 

“Okay.” Jack trusts Matty’s instincts. But none of this sits well with him. 

* * *

GREENLAND

IT ISN’T VERY GREEN

Jack brushes snow off his coat as he climbs off the snowmobile they’ve parked near the massive doors to the facility they’re visiting, and he hears Mac behind him scrambling off as well. Beside him, Desi flicks the kill switch on her and Riley’s ride and the engine whines to a halt. 

“These are way less exciting than Hoth speeders. Colder too,” Jack says. 

“If you use one more Star Wars reference I’m dumping snow down your coat,” Desi says. 

“Behave,” Riley says. “I think our escort is here.” Sure enough, the massive front doors are sliding open. 

“Think those are the blast doors?” Jack whispers to Mac, who suppresses a snorting laugh. “They look like blast doors.” 

The man who steps out shakes each of their hands in turn. “I’m Lars Madsen. Welcome to the International Seed Vault.” 

He ushers them inside. It isn’t exactly any warmer in the corridors, but there’s at least no biting wind blowing. Jack can feel his ears and nose starting to thaw out. 

“We take security very seriously. Every door requires a different key.” Lars holds up a very large cluster of cards hanging from a clip on his coat, each one color-coded with a narrow strip along the top. “There are three doors alone to access the vault corridor, each needing a different swipe card and code.” He swipes them through the first of the interior doors, and Jack watches him input a code.

“Is each employee’s set of access codes unique?” Riley asks. Jack wonders if she thought of that question on the fly or if the equally worn number buttons gave her the idea.

“Yes. Each guard’s codes and swipe card are individualized. It was meant to make it easier to track who went in and out when. The doors require the card and access code from either side, entering or leaving, except in cases of emergency. And the emergency system had not been tripped when Carl disappeared.”

“Maybe someone exploited its protocols and overrode it?” Riley asks. “How good was Carl with computers?”

“Not great. I heard him complain to another guard one day that his kids were going to have to show him how to use the new smartphones we issued all our employees.” Lars shrugs. “Besides, the servers are airgapped and require an administrative level card and code to access, since they not only control security but contain all the information on the contents of the vault. Carl didn’t have one of those, and we’ve called all our admin personnel. All cards are accounted for, and they never gave their codes to anyone.” 

“I didn’t see any guards posted outside,” Desi says as they walk through the door. Jack takes note of a pair of security cameras positioned to catch any movement at the doors. 

“We don’t have any. This facility was built as a peace initiative. Armed guards sends a bad message.”

“And realistically, with a remote location closer to the North Pole than any other civilization, I doubt there was ever a need for a guard station.”

“Yeah, I don’t think they have to worry about Santa Claus breaking in and stealing seeds,” Mac says.

Jack sighs theatrically. “Oh, do  _ not _ start that again. At least this time you don’t have Cage here to back you up with her ‘open mind’ nonsense.”

“I just said, you can’t prove he’s not real.”

“Oh, come  _ on. _ ” Jack scoffs good-humoredly, turning to Lars. “Ignore my partner.”

Mac punches him in the shoulder. 

Desi rolls her eyes at them, Jack figures she’ll probably be an ally in the ‘Santa Claus doesn’t exist’ argument. Then again, he kind of assumed Cage would be too. “We’ll need to talk to whoever was working with Carl that day.”

“He was alone.” At their collective skeptical glances, Lars continues. “Other than a few days a year, when countries make deposits, this facility is mostly unmanned.” 

Lars leads them down a corridor of hallways, which all seem to be arranged like spokes of a wheel radiating out from a center. The central corridor is massive, and that’s the one they’re following, into the heart of the ice. Mac and Riley both seem to be feeling the cold, rubbing their arms and blowing into their gloved hands. 

“The last time Carl was seen on cameras, he was entering the vault itself for his patrol,” Lars says. “That’s where he apparently disappeared.”

“I guess we follow him into the twilight zone then,” Jack says. 

Lars reaches for a rack of thick parkas by the door. “You’ll need to put these on. Temperature in the vault is kept at a negative ten degrees Celsius to protect the seeds.”

“I’m good,” Desi says when the man hands her a coat. “I can’t move in these puffy things.”

“Desi, did you not hear the man?” Riley asks. She’s bundled up tightly in her own parka already, as is Mac. “Negative ten Celsius.”

“That’s practically t-shirt weather.” Desi frowns, but does grab the coat. Instead of putting it on, she slings it over her arm. 

Jack sighs. "Of course you're fine. I haven't forgotten the hotel room in Cancun." 

She turns to him with a raised eyebrow. "You're still mad about  _ that _ ?"

"You had the air conditioning turned up so far I lost the feeling in my nose at night."

"Sixty-five degrees is a heat wave where I come from."

"Yes, well, not all of us are from  _ Michigan _ ."

"Your loss." Desi tosses her hair back over her shoulder. “Let’s go.” 

“I know why you don’t feel the cold,” Jack says with a chuckle. “It’s because you’re hopped up on that coffee stuff twenty-four seven.”

Desi frowns at him. “Coffee  _ stuff? _ It is coffee.”

“No, it is not. It’s radioactive sludge with a sugar kick.” Jack’s watched her make it on ops. He swears a spoon would stand up in the mug when she’s done brewing the grounds, and then she dumps in condensed milk. He’d assumed at first it was to keep herself awake on long stakeouts, but then he’d noticed her drinking it on her downtime too.  _ And then we ran that op in Vietnam and it was everywhere. _

“You just don’t appreciate coffee.” 

“No, I do not. Are you happy now?” 

“More for me. So yes.” 

Lars swipes them into the vault doors, and they all step inside. It is frigid, Jack hears the sucked in, startled breaths around him, and watches Desi, apparently with all the willpower she’s got, tie her parka around her waist instead of putting it on.  _ Stubborn. Just admit you’re cold like the rest of us lowly Californians. Or Texans. Or Oregonians. Wait, is that how you say it? I should ask Riles.  _

“Does the vault have cameras?” Riley asks. 

Lars nods and points upward. “Yes, but it’s so large that they were installed only near the exit, on the assumption that that would catch anyone intending to steal something. We have a record of Carl entering, but there’s no sign he ever left.”

“Maybe he had a heart attack in here or something?” Desi asks. 

“We’ve already searched the vault three times. If there was a body we would have found it.”

“So Carl walked in but he never walked out,” Riley says. “That’s more than a little creepy.”

“Maybe he got beamed out,” Jack suggests as they start walking.

“I think alien abduction is a little far fetched,” Mac says. 

Jack rolls his eyes. “For a man who believes in the existence of Santa Claus, you sure are a skeptic when it comes to my ideas. Well, then, genius, tell me how he got out of here without being snatched by the little grey men.”

“I’m still working on that.”

“Can you just agree that my aliens theory is plausible? Or are you gonna tell me he flew out of here on a magic reindeer? You think they keep that flying corn in here?” Jack remembers that from Oooh, maybe Santa  _ did _ break in. Needed to give his reindeer a little boost.”

“Jack…” Mac groans. 

“I think it’s more plausible that he just dug himself another way out,” Desi says. Mac turns to look at her. “What? It’s basically just a giant snow fort. My cousins and I used to make these giant caves in the piles behind school parking lots in the winter. We dug lots of tunnels in and out so we could have escape routes in case we got pinned down in front by the kids from down the block in a snowball fight.”

“That’s…actually not a bad idea.” Mac says. He stands still and closes his eyes.

“That’s permafrost. It took years to dig this vault with specialized mining tools,” Lars says. “A man with a tool small enough to conceal on him couldn’t…”

Mac opens his eyes again, he looks vaguely frustrated. “I need you all to stop talking. And breathing.” 

“Seriously?” Desi asks.

“Just for a minute,” Mac amends. 

“Just do it,” Jack says, and finally, both Lars and Desi look like they’ll give in. 

Mac starts unzipping his heavy parka. “Whoa whoa whoa, hey,” Jack says. He doesn’t know what Mac is doing, but there’s no way he’s gonna let the kid use his own coat for anything. He ignores the brief shout from his brain that something is  _ very  _ wrong. They haven’t been in here long enough for Mac to get hypothermic enough to think he’s  _ too _ warm. Jack is just still traumatized from Siberia, from the night Mac woke up delirious with the cold and started taking off his winter clothes. Jack had to forcibly wrangle the kid back into his snow pants and parka, with Mac insisting the whole time that he was too warm, like a tired small child. Jack was grateful when the kid finally went back to sleep in Jack’s arms and woke up in the morning more coherent, and with no memory of what he’d been doing the night before. 

“I just need a feather,” Mac says, pulling out his knife and slashing open the lining of his coat. He removes a single down feather. “Now…everyone really does need to hold their breath.”

Jack does, and he watches the others follow suit. 

Mac holds up the feather, and watches it waver. “There’s a draft,” He says. “There’s another opening somewhere in this vault.”

He holds the feather out in front of him as he starts walking. “It’s coming from this direction,” He says, pointing ahead and to the left. “And it’s getting stronger.” Jack watches the feather flutter more distinctly.

“There. Right behind those boxes.” Mac drops the feather and starts pulling a stack of boxes off a shelf. Jack pitches in to help him, then stares. Behind the shelf, a shadowy tunnel leads away from the room.

“Well, this definitely isn’t on the schematics,” Riley says. “Looks like we found where Carl went.”

* * *

SEED VAULT

IT JUST GOT A LOT MORE INTERESTING

Desi watches as Mac kneels down in front of the tunnel, running his fingers around the rough ice. He’s got that look of intense concentration she’s learned to recognize. It means he’s totally focused on what’s in front of him and probably won’t respond to anyone or anything that isn’t factoring into his mental calculations. 

She looks from him to Dalton, wondering if the pattern is still going to hold. Sure enough, Jack’s posture is changing too. More alert, more defensive. As MacGyver zones out to the world around him, Jack tunes in further.  _ He knows Mac won’t be able to react to an unrelated danger fast enough, so he’s preparing to.  _

Desi’s seen this level of instinctive awareness of a partner only a few times in all her years with the agencies. Normally it comes only after almost a decade of teamwork. But according to the files, MacGyver and Dalton have only been a team for the past three years.  _ If anything, I’d expect him to share more of a bond like that with Riley.  _ Then again, Riley has proven to be quite adept at dealing with her own problems. Desi still can’t quite forget seeing the hacker bent over studiously working on disarming a missile system when one of the goons they were fighting ripped out of Desi’s hold and went after her. Without even turning around or skipping a keystroke, Riley had smashed her elbow backward into the man’s sternum, knocking him backward, and gone right back to typing. 

“This tunnel was dug from the outside in.” MacGyver says, pointing to the edges. “You can see the marks of the drill here.” 

“So maybe Carl had an outside partner?” Jack says. “Or did this on his off hours?”

“I guess we’ll find out when we find him,” Riley says. “I’m still not having any luck tracking his phone. I think it’s dead. Or been destroyed.”

“Makes sense. If I was going to steal something that could potentially shift political balances and start World War III I’d turn my phone off too,” Desi says. “You know, maybe this wasn’t about whatever was in these boxes. Maybe it’s about destabilizing this peace agreement.” 

Jack nods. “Just breaching the vault would be enough to make a lot of nations back out.” 

“We haven’t released any of this information yet,” Lars says. “But we’re mandated to share reports of any incident within twenty-four hours of report.”

“So in less than a day every country participating in this project is going to get the news that the vault they thought was impenetrable has been broken into, and that we can’t be sure if anything was stolen.” Riley frowns. “Is there any way to…not have to report it?”

“Only if we can find anyone involved in this situation, make sure they return anything they stole, and seal up this tunnel. Even then, we will need to make a notification.” Lars sighs. “I’m afraid the chain of events is already in motion. Carl would have known that just this would be enough to potentially dismantle the whole peace agreements. I cannot imagine a man like him willing to risk so much.”

“Sometimes people aren’t who you think they are,” Jack says. “Man could have been a sleeper agent. Or just decided to make a name for himself. Or been corrupted by someone who recruited him.” 

“Our best shot at answers is finding what’s at the other end of that tunnel,” Desi says. “I can go in and check it out.”

Jack nods. “Go for it. Be careful, though. Carl’s probably long gone, but…”

“I’ll watch my step.” She sheds her parka from around her waist so it doesn’t get snagged on anything and crawls into the opening. It really does feel like being a kid climbing through snow tunnels again. She can see her breath frosting in the air, and the chill bleeding through her gloves and the knees of her pants is familiar. She half expects to hear Quyen laughing ahead of her.

There is  _ something _ in front of her, she can see it now past a slight curve in the tunnel’s shape. She crawls up and then pulls back slightly with a startled gasp. It’s a body, with the same kind of coat Lars was wearing, and despite the frosted blueness of the face, she recognizes Carl Adams from his file’s photo. 

She turns around and shouts back to the team. “Well, if Carl had a partner, they weren’t the kind who’s interested in sharing. Carl’s dead.” 

“Damn,” She hears Jack say.  _ That doesn’t even begin to cover it. Whoever did this, whether they were in league with Carl or not, made sure that any link we might have had to them was gone. Carl was our only lead, and with him dead…it’ll be a lot harder to find whoever was responsible.  _ It looks more and more like her theory might be right. This wasn’t just a theft. It was the first spark of a war. 

“Can you bring the body out?” Jack calls. 

“I think so.” Desi rolls the man back and forth a few times. His legs and hands had melted some of the ice around them before it refroze.  _ He was definitely put here right after he was killed, or it was done right here _ . Although the blow to the head that’s caked blood onto the ice below it would have been difficult to do forcefully enough in this kind of confined space _ . _

Once she’s freed up the body, she pulls it behind her out of the tunnel.  _ Well, on the bright side, I’m definitely not cold anymore.  _ She pulls her hat off and tucks her sweaty hair into it a little better when she stands up.

Jack glances over the body. “He’s been dead for a while,” He says dispassionately. Desi knows she’ll watch him crumble later, watch him grieve for the family who lost a parent.  _ Fathers hit him especially hard. _ She hadn’t been there when he lost his own father, but she’d been able to tell from his letters, few and far between, that it was a heavy blow. He hadn’t seemed the same for a long time _ . _ “Probably not long after he entered the vault on the security tapes,” Jack adds, turning away from the body.

“I’ll check his phone, see if he had any contact with anyone who might be his partner in crime.” Riley says. She reaches into his jacket pocket and picks it up. “Okay, it’s dead. Must have run out of battery in the cold.” She plugs it into her rig. “It’ll take a few minutes for it to recharge enough to turn on.”

“You don’t actually think that Carl was…” Lars asks.

“We can’t rule anything out.” Desi shakes her head. “The fact that he was killed doesn’t prove his innocence. It just proves that whoever we’re dealing with is ruthless.” 

She glances at Jack, who’s stepped off the side talking low on comms. He’s probably just relaying the situation to Matty. But his whole posture is tense and his hand is a tight fist at his side. If she could see through his glove, his knuckles would be white, she’s sure.  _ He’s not telling us everything about this. _ She watched him run off after Matty’s briefing and come back looking shaken.  _ There’s more going on here, and I don’t like not knowing. _

Desi bends down next to the tunnel entrance. There’s some scraped snow lying around the opening, and in it she can see drag marks where Carl must have been pulled inside, and a few scuffed boot prints that don’t even come close to matching the tread on Carl’s sole.

“I got prints,” Desi says.

“Okay, take a picture and send them to me,” Riley says without breaking her concentration on the screen. “I’ll see if I can match the tread to a specific boot and see if there are any sale records that could help us.” Desi snaps a few photos. 

“Wait, would you know if any of these boxes had been tampered with?” Mac asks Lars.

“The boxes are all sealed and secured. Our most recent deposits have a tamper indicator strap that would be impossible to repair after opening, but many of the older ones have not yet been fitted. That was a new development.”

“So searching everything in here might be our next move?” Jack asks. 

Riley suddenly clears her throat, drawing everyone’s attention back to her. “Okay, well, it looks like the only calls and texts Carl’s made recently are to family or people that are recognized as contacts from this job. And I’m scanning all his conversations, including emails, for any potential keywords...but I don’t think this was planned, at least not on his part.” Riley says. “It looks like Carl was just doing his job, when he came across an intruder. Who must have come in through that tunnel. But he wasn’t here at the entrance when the fight started, so our mystery driller  _ did _ come into the vault looking for something.”

“He caught them looking for something, confronted them, and they killed him.” Jack frowns. “What in here is worth stealing and killing someone over?” He glances at the boxes around them. “I’d have expected something more like sabotage.” 

“Maybe we  _ can _ figure out what it was. I think Carl can tell us.”

“Have you suddenly acquired a pair of Miracle Max bellows I know nothing about?” Jack asks. “Because other than that, I’m pretty sure dead men tell no tales.”

“Stop mixing your movie metaphors, Jack,” Riley says, shaking her head. “Carl can’t talk to us, but his phone can.” She holds it up. “These phones have a highly sensitive GPS and gyroscopic system,” Riley says. “It can pinpoint where Carl was in real time. Even how far off the floor.”

“So if we back it up we can…”

“Find out where he first encountered his killer, and at least narrow down how many boxes we need to sort through.” Riley nods. “Our best chance is to recreate the fight in reverse. With stand-ins for Carl and his mystery attacker,” Riley says. “Mac, you’re approximately the same height and weight as Carl, based on his personnel file.”

“Okay, I’ll stand in for him,” Mac says. 

“And I have an approximate height and weight of our thief, based on his boot prints. Which, by the way, analysis indicates are a three-year-old model of a French manufacturer’s cold-weather hiking boot, sold off the shelf in hundreds of European camping stores. Desi, you match the size and pressure of the thief's steps, closest of anyone in our team.”

“Oooh, playing for the other team. Fun.” Desi sets down her parka and stretches out her hands, fingers interlaced.  _ I still haven’t quite gotten used to how these people do their job, but I’m starting to enjoy it. _

MacGyver looks far from comfortable as he lays down on the floor. Desi wonders if he’s feeling the cold.  _ Cali kids.  _ She’s fallen asleep in snow forts in weather worse than this. Mac looks stiff, clenching his hands and his jaw.

“Okay, Carl’s phone was six inches from the floor here, and went from there back to…” Riley follows along as Desi drags Mac over the floor. “Here. Okay, this looks like where Carl was knocked down.”

Mac stands up, and Desi frowns. “Blunt instrument used for the attack. Weapon of convenience. Like…” She glances at Lars’s gear belt. “Can I borrow your flashlight?” 

He hands it over. Desi makes a mock show of smacking it into MacGyver’s forehead, and he flinches hard. The next second he recovers with a sharp swallow.

“Okay, nope, that didn’t look right,” Riley says. “The phone was lower.”

“Our thief must have put him in a headlock,” Desi says, wrapping her arm around MacGyver’s neck and forcing him down, holding the flashlight against the side of his head.

“Okay, yeah, that’s it.”

“Gues, I got something,” Mac says, sort of muffled. “There’s something under this shelf, I just saw it now.” Desi lets go, and he kneels down to pull out a prybar.

“Well, there’s our weapon,” Desi says. “Looks like he did come in to open something up.” Mac hands Riley the prybar gingerly, and she sets it down next to their discarded gear. There’s almost no chance there will be viable fingerprints or anything useful on it, but it is evidence. 

“Now there’s a whole lot of action over slightly to your left,” Riley says. “It’s a pretty decent sized knot but it looks like Carl was pretty close to those shelves at one point.”

Desi’s pretty sure she knows why.  _ If I was the thief I’d have been trying to use these heavy metal shelves to take my attacker out of commission.  _

She twists MacGyver’s arm behind him and slams him up against the shelves of boxes, then starts to shove him forward. Mac stumbles and goes down hard, but the next second he’s rolling over, holding up his hands to protect himself, eyes wide. Desi steps back.  _ Okay, what? _

“What the hell did you do that for?” Jack asks, practically shoving her out of the way as he runs up.

“I’m following the phone movements.” She frowns. “That’s just what Riley said Carl’s motion did.” 

“It didn’t tell you to be so rough.” Jack steps up beside Mac, who has sort of curled in on himself, shaking. “Mac?” Jack asks, his voice worried as he bends down. “Are you okay?”

_ I didn’t even throw him that hard.  _ Desi snorts, glaring down at the agent gasping on the ground.  _ How did he pass for the field at all if he can’t take even a fake fight?  _ It sounds like he’s had the wind knocked out of him, or is trying not to cry. Maybe both. 

“I...uh…” MacGyver sits up slowly, with Jack’s help. “I…”

“Hey, hey, kiddo, just breathe.” Jack pulls Mac’s head against his shoulder. “Match mine. Breathe in, breathe out.”

“I’m okay.” Mac pushes Jack away after a few moments. “Just got the wind knocked out of me, that’s all.” 

“Okay, sit this out.” Jack helps Mac to his feet. “Go wait with Riles. You and I are only a couple inches apart and I know Desi can still toss me around like a rag doll, we’ll manage.” 

Desi frowns.  _ What is he doing? _ Jack was the toughest on slackers and wimps that she knew at the Farm. Tougher than most of the instructors. No quarter asked or given, if you couldn’t toughen up he was going to either make you or break you. Never pulled his punches, no matter who he was fighting. She’s always respected that, and been grateful for him treating her like an equal there. 

So the fact that he just pulled Mac over to a corner and is taking his place just because the kid got pissy about being thrown around a little doesn’t seem to fit the Jack she knows. Actually, none of his interaction with MacGyver seems in character. How this kid managed to become the exception to Jack’s hard and fast rules, she’s unsure. 

“Jack?” She asks. 

“You wanna finish this?” His voice is sharp and angry.  _ Hey, don’t take it out on me that teacher’s pet got a little banged up. _ Mac agreed to be the stand in for their guard, and it’s not Desi’s fault that reenacting that fight ended up with him on the ground. She’s just doing her job. No reason for Dalton to make her the bad guy. But clearly he’s lost his objectivity when it comes to MacGyver. 

_ I guess part of it could be that he’s taken the kid under his wing as a son. _ But then again, he seems to have the same mentality toward Riley, but didn’t freak out half so badly when she fought off a handful of those gun smugglers alongside Desi.  _ Those were actual bad guys, could have killed her. And he didn’t tell her to stand down. _

She goes through the rest of Riley’s directions robotically, noting dimly that whoever did this had to be highly trained, given the kinds of moves she’s doing to take Jack down.  _ Running up walls, kicking off of other objects in the room…this is advanced level tactical martial arts. _ They’re looking for a pro. 

“Okay, that’s it,” Riley finally says. “The movement is steady up to here.”

“So Carl was doing his patrol, came around this corner, and saw the thief,” Jack says. “Which means whatever he was after was…in that row of boxes.”

“Well, at least it’s two dozen instead of two thousand,” Desi says wearily. “And maybe we can tell which one was opened rec…”

Her voice cuts off at the sound of a thundering roar and a choked off cry of pain, from somewhere behind them. 

_ The tunnel. Mac? _

* * *

“Mac, are you okay?” Riley whispers as he joins her.

He just nods. He doesn’t trust himself to speak.

_ I thought I was fine. I was going to be fine. And then she slammed me up against that shelf and… _ everything had come rushing back. 

“I’m going to go check out the tunnel,” Mac says weakly.  _ I need to be alone for a minute. I need to get this under control. I have to.  _ He can’t let Desi see how close he is to a flashback. Because then she’ll ask questions. And questions mean telling her things he’d rather not. 

_ She has my file, but Matty and Patty made sure that the truth about Bishop and CCI and Murdoc was redacted so far even Riley’s skills couldn’t get it. _ He’s sure Desi’s done enough digging to know something about his criminal past, but he’s not sure she put all the pieces together.  _ News articles don’t talk about what’s likely to happen once someone goes to prison. Because no one cares.  _ Even if people did know, they might have decided he deserved it.

He pushes the thoughts away. Desi doesn’t know, or at least he doesn’t think she does. And if he can keep acting normal in front of her, she’ll never have to know.

He bends down and crawls into the tunnel, trying to ignore how bad the confined space feels. At least it isn’t dark, the ice reflects the light of his small flashlight and makes the tunnel almost seem like it glows. Which is eerie in and of itself. He’ll be glad to get to the other end. 

He passes the bloodied spot where Carl’s body was left, and grimaces, glancing briefly at it before continuing forward. He wonders how far this tunnel goes.  _ There are no exterior guards, but wouldn’t someone have noticed any activity out here? _ It would have taken time to work a way through the permafrost. He didn’t see anything that looked suspicious when he and Jack rode in on the snowmobiles, but then again, he was trying to keep his eyes closed against the wind and flying snow, so he didn’t exactly see much of anything. 

He takes a deep, shaky breath. He has to calm down. He’s okay, no one was going to hurt him. Desi wasn’t going to do anything. She was just pretending, it was just a fake fight.

He blinks, squeezing his eyes closed and then opening them again, because it feels like the world is shaking around him and  _ no, _ he does  _ not  _ need to have a panic attack in here. He can’t afford that.

But when he opens his eyes, the world is  _ still _ shaking, and snow and ice are starting to fall down on him.  _ The tunnel is caving in. _ He tries to turn around, but he can’t quite manage in the small space. So he crawls backward as quickly as he can. He wasn’t too far in, right?

A chunk of falling ice slams into his shoulder, knocking him sideways into the wall. His head hits hard, and the world seems to spark around him, and suddenly everything seems muffled and slow and wrong.  _ Not good, not good. _

“Jack!” he shouts, almost unthinkingly. Jack will help him.

“Mac!!!” The screams are muffled and drowned by the roar of falling snow.

* * *

Riley rushes toward the tunnel entrance. “Mac! Mac!” She and Jack and Desi are all shouting, but there’s no response, and that terrifies her. She tries to tell herself that maybe the snow is just muffling things, maybe Mac is on the other side already. But she knows that’s not true. She tries to block images of Mac crushed under tons of ice and rock out of her mind, and focus on what she has to do right now. 

The tunnel itself looks intact at first, but as soon as 

“We have to dig him out of there.” Riley says, reaching for the prybar on the floor.  _ Maybe I can use this as a shovel. That’s what Mac would do if it was one of us in there. _

“That tunnel has to go somewhere. Maybe it’ll be more easily accessible from the other end?” Jack says. He sounds eerily calm for someone who just watched his son get buried under half the mountain. It’s almost scarier than seeing him visibly worried.

Desi nods. “Good idea, Jack. I’ll go up top and take Lars with me. We’ll see if we can find where the tunnel lets out, and whether it’ll be easier to get to Mac from there. He might even have made it out that end and be waiting for us.”

Jack nods. 

Riley wants to believe Desi could be right, but Desi doesn’t know Mac like the rest of the team does. She’s not aware of how often his luck is very, very bad.  _ I wish they’d find him safe and sound at the other end. But it’s Mac, so probably worst case scenario has happened. He’s buried under tons of snow. _

“Mac?” She calls in, even though she isn’t sure he can hear her. “We’re coming for you, okay?”

She helps Jack start moving some of the larger chunks of fallen ice as carefully as she can. They can’t afford to just sit around and wait for Desi to report back. She can hear the chatter, and the roar of snowmobiles, through her comms while they work.

“Tunnel led out on this side of the vault,” Desi is saying. “What’s over here?”

“Transmission towers for the vault’s cellular and internet signals. And what’s left of the housing site for the construction workers.”

“Housing site?” Desi asks.

“It’s been abandoned since the nineties. And a blizzard in ’03 collapsed most of the still-standing buildings. They had never been made to last.”

“You didn’t check out here for Carl?” Desi asks.

“We had no reason to believe he could have left the vault.”

“Well, that house is still standing,” Desi says. There’s an abrupt whine as the snowmobiles shut off, and then the creak of a door. Riley shakes out frozen fingers as she sets down another block of ice inside the vault. But she can’t complain, Mac definitely has it much, much worse.

“No sign of MacGyver,” Desi says, and the small amount of hope Riley was holding onto sinks into the ground. “But there is a trapdoor in the floor.” There’s a hollow thud and more creaking. “Okay, this is definitely where our thief set up shop. There’s a tunnel entrance here, and Lars just found a lot of drilling equipment in a closet.” There’s a soft thump, and then Desi’s voice sounds oddly echoey. “I’m going into the tunnel now.” 

There’s the thud of footsteps and then a muffled curse in what Riley assumes is Vietnamese. 

“We can’t get to him from this side. There’s a big section collapsed right in front of us.” Desi’s voice comes through tinny. “I’m going to come back and we’ll help you dig him out from your end.” 

“Okay.” Riley continues to help Jack, but it’s slower going now. The pieces are wedged in tight, and they’re heavy.

Jack pulls a large chunk aside with a groan, and then Riley hears something. Ragged, shaky breathing. “Mac?” Jack calls in.

“J-jack?”

“Kiddo, you have no idea how good it is to hear your voice.” Jack’s relief is palpable in his voice. 

“C-can’t be better than h-hearing yours.” Mac sounds shaky and there’s a pained strain in his tone, but at least he’s alive and alert and capable of talking. 

There’s a scuff of boots behind them, and Desi kneels down beside Riley. 

“Mac, we’re gonna get you out of there. How are you holding up?”

“C-cold, leg hurts.” Mac’s voice is wobbly. 

“Well, we’re gonna fix that real soon, okay bud?” Jack says. He reaches for another chunk, but Desi rests a hand on his arm, stopping his movement.

“Careful. We can’t risk destabilizing this more,” Desi says. “Just because we’ve found him and he’s alive doesn’t mean we can get sloppy. Because if this all shifts again, he still might not make it out.”

“You know about ice tunnel safety?” Riley asks.

“Trained in Search and Rescue.” Desi says. “Following the same protocols I would for an avalanche victim. If something doesn’t move easily, don’t pull on it, it’s probably holding other things up. It’s like a game of Jenga, but you’re allowed to take your hand off a piece if it’s not going to work.”

“Is there  _ anything _ she can’t do?” Riley whispers to Jack as they move back to let Desi go in and assess the structural integrity.

“Well, she’s a terrible sketch artist,” Jack chuckles. “Even her stick figures look deformed.” 

“Ha, very funny.” Desi calls back, and then a chunk of ice rolls out to them. “I have eyes on MacGyver. Well, at least his boot. Looks like a big piece is in between us and him, and that piece is also supporting what’s left of the roof of the tunnel at this point. I don’t have enough room to maneuver him around it.”

“Well, how do we fix that?” Jack asks.

“We need to brace with something else. Mac, you’ll have to do it from your side. Can you see some large pieces you can stack up to hold the top of the tunnel in place?”

“Already o-on it.” Mac says. “They’re not as big, I don’t think they’ll hold very long.”

“Well, that’s okay,” Desi says. “Once we get this big piece out of the way, I won’t need very long to get you out.” 

“Okay, I got it. Roof’s braced,” Mac says. His voice sounds a lot weaker. 

“Alright. I’m going to roll this piece back to Jack and Riley and then I’m gonna pull you out, okay?” Desi says. 

“Okay.” There’s a scuff of something moving, and then a strangled scream from Mac that dies out. Riley doesn’t have time to waste wondering why moving that chunk put him in so much pain. 

“Okay, this is all yours!” Desi says with a grunt of exertion, and Jack and Riley move forward to get a grip on the huge chunk of ice and pull it out. Riley hears ominous creaking, and she tugs harder. The opening has to be free for Mac and Desi to get out.

Desi’s legs appear in the opening, she’s crawling backward, pulling Mac. Jack grabs her coat and tugs her the rest of the way out, and then grabs onto Mac’s legs, pulling him out as well, just before there’s a heavy clattering rumble from inside the tunnel and snow and ice spatters out as the rest of the roof collapses.

Riley falls back against the vault wall, feeling suddenly boneless.  _ It’s okay. Mac’s alive. We got him out. _

* * *

Desi catches her breath and glances down at MacGyver’s still body. He’d been awake and coherent until she moved that massive ice chunk; she’s fairly sure it was resting on his leg and releasing the pressure made the pain suddenly hit hard. He’d passed out, he was unconscious when she got to him and dragged him back.

“He’s hypothermic.” Jack ghosts a hand over Mac’s pale face and bluish lips. “We have to get him out of here and get his body temp up.” 

“There’s an infirmary in the vault,” Lars says. “We’re more than prepared to deal with cold weather emergencies. And a medic is here, flown in today given the situation.”

“Here.” Desi shrugs out of her coat. “I’m good, and he needs all the warmth he can get.” Jack gives her an unreadable look.  _ What? I thought you were coddling him unnecessarily earlier, that doesn’t mean I won’t help in a life and death situation. _

She helps Jack and Lars load Mac onto a medical gurney and wheel him back to the infirmary. Halfway there, Mac wakes up abruptly, thrashing around and fighting the gurney restraints until Jack calms him down with a hand on his shoulder and some soft whispering Desi can’t quite make out. Jack looks incredibly reluctant to hand Mac off to the medic when they reach the infirmary, and he paces back and forth in the miniscule waiting room. Riley pulls off damp gloves and flexes her fingers, blowing on her hands. Jack notices and bends down in front of her, taking her hands in his and rubbing briskly. 

“He’s gonna be okay, Riles.” 

She nods, she’s shaking too. Probably in shock. Desi grabs an emergency blanket from a stack on a medical cart and puts it around her shoulders. She’d do the same for Jack, but she thinks all she’d get would be a glare. Riley pulls the blanket around her, fingers white-knuckled where they’re clenched in the cloth. 

Lars comes in with cups of something steaming. It’s coffee, surprisingly not totally gross, although it’s not as strong as Desi would prefer.  _ At least it’s better than hospital coffee. _

Finally, the door to the medical part of the infirmary opens, and the medic steps out, glancing at them. “Mr. MacGyver is going to be fine,” he says. “He has a bruised bone in his leg, which is likely going to be incredibly painful for some time, and a mild concussion as well. Other than that, my main concern is the hypothermia, which was accelerated by the other conditions. We won’t push fluids by mouth until we’re sure he’s fully conscious,” the medic says. “In the meantime I’m starting a warm saline IV and using heating blankets to rewarm him slowly. It’ll be a few hours before we can get his body back up to a safe temperature, but rewarming him faster risks complications.” 

“I’ll stay with him,” Jack says. “Riley, Dez, it’s up to you what you want to do.”

“I’ll go help Lars check those boxes,” Desi says. She feels a little uncomfortable and out of place here. There’s a deep camaraderie between Jack and Riley and MacGyver that she isn’t part of yet, and waiting around in medical has never been her thing besides. 

Riley looks torn, but she finally turns toward the door. “Keep comms on and let me know when he wakes up,” she says, her voice a little trembly. She hands the blanket over to the medic and follows Desi and Lars to the door.

Once they’re back in the vault, the three of them head straight for the set of shelves Desi and Jack ended up at before the tunnel collapsed. They pull every crate off the shelf, but all of them seem to be tightly sealed up, just the same each time.

“Well, this is a dead end,” Desi says. “Or does this mean that Carl chased this guy off before he got what he came for?”

“Maybe not,” Riley replies. “We found a prybar, right? Which means the thief was going to open these crates up. And I don’t think he’d leave without what he came for, if he killed to get it. I think we need to see which of these has marks of being opened on it.”

She runs her hands over two of the boxes, then looks up. “See, right here? The wood is dented in and cracked a little, and the edges are a lighter color, which means it’s recent damage and not weathered at all.” 

“So this is it?” Desi asks. “He went to a lot of trouble to put this back the way he found it.” That doesn’t fit with her theory of someone planning to destabilize the peace agreement.  _ I would assume that would mean he wanted someone to know he was here. _

“This is bad,” Lars says. He’s staring at the box. 

“What?” Riley asks. 

“The code stamp on the top means this box belongs to North Korea.”

And just like that, Desi’s destabilization theory is right back on track. 

“Okay, let’s open it up and see what he took.” Lars hands her a prybar and takes another one for himself, and they lift the lid off to reveal a smaller packing container inside, with a paper taped on the top of it. The inventory list.

“You take the list,” Riley says, handing it to Lars. “Desi, you and I can take pictures of it on our phones. That way we can split up the contents and go through them faster.” Desi has to agree it’s a good plan. She snaps a photo, picks up a set of identical little silver packages, and sits down on the floor to check their numbers against the list. 

Mostly, the list is in order, just like the packets, but taking the box off the shelf multiple times and the thief’s rummaging through it have disturbed the contents. The search starts to feel like a game of ‘Go Fish’.

“Do you have an RCJ-34659?” Desi asks.

“Got it.” Riley holds up a silver packet. “Anyone seen an AFN-198347?”

The cycle continues until Lars calls out for a “FCN-222084”. Desi and Riley both search their piles twice, but come up dry. 

“I think we found the missing inventory item,” Lars says. “This packet is on the packing list but not inside the box.” He shows Riley the plant’s actual name, and she types it into her computer, then looks up with an almost amusingly confused frown.

“It’s a rare form of a pea plant found only in North Korea.” 

“What does this guy want with a pea plant?” Jack asks over the comms. “Plant it and grow a ladder to a giant’s house?”

“That’s a beanstalk,” Desi says.

“Mac might know when he wakes up,” Riley says. “I’ll admit, it has me stumped. I’ll try and look this thing up, see if there’s some sort of black market value. Maybe it’s part of some health kick? One of those snake oil things?” She types something, then looks up. This frown is a lot less confused and definitely more worried. “Okay, well, whatever this guy wants that pea plant for, it’s  _ not _ for the newest diet fad,” Riley says. “This plant can be used as the base ingredient for a very potent toxin. A few grams in the water supply could be catastrophic to a city, and it can also be aerosolized.”

“Okay, so this dude just stole a seriously dangerous bioweapon?” Jack asks. “This just went from bad to worse really, really fast.”

Desi nods, then stands up. “Maybe there’s some answers in the shack on the other end of this.” She and Lars were too busy focusing on finding the tunnel entrance and Mac to sweep the place, but it had definitely been lived in. 

“That’s probably the best lead we’re going to get. I’m coming with you,” Jack says, and Desi shrugs back into her coat as they head for the doors.

* * *

PHOENIX HOLDING ROOMS

ONE OF THE ONES THAT HAVE CAMERAS

“Of all the friends he could have chosen.” James shakes his head. “What made you so special, Wilt?”

“Unlike you, Mac doesn’t consider what usefulness people in his life have to him.” Bozer bites back. “He doesn’t pick his friends for what they can do for him. He picks them for who they are.” He’s trying to keep his cool, but that’s hard to do, sitting across from the man who ruined his best friend’s whole life.  _ If not for you, Mac would be so much happier. _ Bozer feels only a little uncharitable for thinking they’d all be better off if James had died instead of Ellie in that car bombing. 

Mac finally told him the truth about what had happened. Apparently, before he died, Jonah Walsh had revealed that Mac’s mother was killed in a bombing meant for her husband, and it was a small miracle Mac hadn’t died too.  _ The man who did it is rotting in a black site, but honestly the only thing I can fault him for is not doing the job well enough. _ Walsh said he thought that was what pushed James over the edge into insanity, that even putting Elliot Mason away didn’t solve his permanent paranoia. Bozer isn’t so sure James wasn’t like this all the time.  _ I wonder if his wife was just the buffer. When he lost her to take things out on, he attacked Mac, and became more vicious with his co-workers. And then vanished.  _

“Oh, I think you’re wrong. I trained Angus to see the world in terms of what he can use. It’s in his blood. There must be something about you he feels he needs.” 

Bozer shrugs. “Maybe there is. He was looking for someone who would be there for him. Someone he could count on. Someone who could do something to fill the gap  _ you _ left behind.” He tries to fill the words with as much bitter poison as he can.  _ I’m going to give him a piece of my mind and hope he chokes on it. _ He knows he’s here to get information, but everyone who’s tried before him has failed, unless James wanted them to win to further his own sick little game.  _ Cage thinks he only gave us Gomez because he wanted Mac to feel like he was a pawn, that his team had sold him out to get that information. He wanted Mac to feel used. So he held up his end of the bargain. _ James plays sick mind games. Bozer isn’t going to let him do that now.

“And yet, thanks to you, he went to prison.” James leans a little further over the table and Bozer pulls back involuntarily. “I think he could have chosen his friends a bit more wisely.”

“Don’t sit there and talk like you’re the kind of dad who cares about his son’s welfare,” Bozer snaps. “You lost the right to criticize his choices when you walked out the door. And besides, you’re the one sitting in a cell right now, so I don’t think you have a reason to judge Mac’s past. At least  _ he _ was trying to do something good. He wasn’t selling his inventions for a profit to mass murderers.” 

“Oh Wilt. You still don’t see it.” James says. “People like us, we’ve moved beyond good and evil. There is power, and those who are strong enough to take it, and that is all.”

“You sound like the kind of guy who’d say winners write the history books,” Bozer says. 

“Because they do.” James sits back in his seat, resting his hands on the table. It looks so much like the way Mac sits sometimes that Bozer winces. 

He doesn’t like thinking that there’s any connection between those two. These days, it’s easy to forget Mac and Jack aren’t actually blood related. Bozer had almost forgotten about James entirely until Matty brought him up. 

“Mac protects people. You killed hundreds, but your son has saved thousands, all around the world. He’s a hero. People owe him their lives.” Bozer fixes James with a challenging stare. “I come home at night proud to be part of Mac’s team. Proud to have been there to help him defend people who are in danger, and save them from monsters like you.” 

James looks totally unmoved. “So you’ve saved them. For a year. Until the next warlord moves in and exploits them. In the end, what have you really accomplished? You’ve only prolonged their suffering and been cruel enough to dangle the possibility of better in front of them, without being able to promise it. Face it, you’re cruler than I am. I end their lives quickly, as painlessly as possible. You give them hope, and hope is only cruel. In the end, what good have you done?”

“You’ve bought another year.” Bozer says. “Anything can happen in a year.” 

* * *

OLD CONSTRUCTION CABIN

IT KIND OF LOOKS LIKE A COLLEGE DORM ROOM

RIGHT DOWN TO THE SCIENCY STUFF ON THE WALL

“This is like a very special episode of  _ Hoarders, _ ” Desi says in disgust, holding up a pickle jar in two fingers. 

“I don’t know, I kinda feel at home here,” Jack says.

“If Mom heard you say that…” Riley says, mock threateningly.

“Kidding, kidding,” Jack replies, holding up his hands in surrender. He glances around. So far, Riley’s been able to determine that the chemical structure schematics on the wall are in fact the breakdown of the biotoxin made from the pea plant. But there’s no sign of lab equipment the thief would have needed to process the toxin and make it viable. Jack wonders if this is about the long game.  _ He has seeds, he could grow as much as he wanted.  _ And if he’s truly managed to destabilize a peace accord, he’d certainly have a market for his product.  _ Killing two birds with one stone. Or ice drill bit. _ Create a conflict and then sell weapons for it. Jack’s really beginning to hate this guy. But also to recognize the cunning evil behind the thought. 

_ It’s exactly the kind of twisted long game James MacGyver would plan. _

He jumps when Riley steps up beside him. “Why are you not with Mac?” Riley whispers. “Normally when he gets hurt you are glued to his side.”

Jack doesn’t think it can hurt to tell her the truth. She’ll keep the secret where she has to, and he needs to get this off his chest to someone. And have an ally in here in case they find what he’s afraid they might. 

“Because James MacGyver designed the seed vault, Riley. Before he left Phoenix. And I don’t want Dez to accidentally run across any papers that could tie James to this thing. She doesn’t need another reason to dislike Mac, or worse to stop trusting him.” Jack can only imagine what would happen if Desi thought Mac and James were in on this together. 

“You think he could be behind this somehow?”

“Matty does. She’s got him in interrogation right now trying to wring something out of him.” He doesn’t mention Bozer’s doing the interrogating. “But unless we get something worth following up, I’d like to keep his potential involvement out of this op. Mac would be distracted and start guilting himself for no reason if he found out. And Desi…”

Riley sighs. “How long do you think we can really hide the truth? She’s a trained spy, Jack. I mean…she’s not me, but you don’t have to be to do enough digging to get the truth.”

“We’ll hide it until Mac’s ready to tell her himself.” 

Just then, Desi walks up. “Find anything interesting?”

“Not yet,” Riley says. “Aside from the bioweapon plans. And this computer, which has a multilevel encryption protection on it. I’m going to try and get through it, but that could take hours if not days.”

_ Yep, totally just another boring day at the office. _ Jack opens the trapdoor and glances down. “Well, if he hid anything in that tunnel we’re not going to be able to get it now.” Apparently the thief wasn’t as skilled in designing tunnels as he was in planning break-ins. Desi says she’s surprised it lasted as long as it did. 

“This would have taken him months to build,” Riley mutters.

“Actually almost a year,” Jack says. “Tunneling through the permafrost like that is no joke.” When both Riley and Desi turn and give him strange looks, he shrugs. “What? Mac made me watch a documentary on ice core drilling with him when he was laid up one time. I’m not allowed to know things?”

Riley shakes her head, smiling a little. “Well, this guy’s incredibly patient, I’ll give him that.” 

“Why tunnel when you could just steal a guard’s ID and passcodes?” Desi asks. “The weak points in any security system are the human element. A little social engineering would have taken a lot less time.” 

Riley shakes her head. “Because it takes more than an ID to get in. According to my schematics there are facial rec scanners in the security cameras as well. If the faces it picks up don’t match the ones on file in our database for workers or visitors, the base goes into lockdown.”

“And our thief didn’t want to risk getting trapped inside, so he made an escape plan that he knew  _ couldn’t _ be locked down.” Desi frowns. “It sounds like he knew this place inside and out.” 

Jack grimaces.  _ It sure does. Maybe because James told him. _ He hates the idea that somehow, from behind bars, that monster is still pulling strings.  _ But if there’s anyone who could do it, it’s him. _

“Well, until I get through the encryptions on this computer, we’re stuck,” Riley says. “I vote we pack up whatever we can use and go back to the base. Check on Mac.”

“Sounds good to me.” Jack grabs the papers off the desk, some of which are in French, apparently, and puts them into his bag. Riley takes the computer, and all of them head back to the snowmobiles and the vault. 

When they get to the infirmary, the medic greets them. “Your agent is awake and insisting on getting out of bed.”

“Of course he is. Can I talk to him?” Jack asks. 

“Certainly. See if you have more luck with him than I did.” Jack knows the look on the medic’s face all too well. It’s the thousand-yard stare of someone who’s had to deal with Mac’s incredible dislike of medical facilities. He’s pretty sure all the Phoenix Med personnel have had that look at one time or another.  _ And Matty used to say I was a problem. _

Mac is lying in one of the two narrow beds in the infirmary. He’s wearing a hospital gown, but Jack can only tell because his clothes are draped over a chair next to a small heater. Mac is covered in several layers of blankets pulled up closely around him. They’re all manner of tangled, which Jack can only assume is a result of the kid’s attempts to get up. 

Mac looks up at him, blue eyes a little hazy under the messy fringe of hair falling into his face. Jack can’t help but smile just a little. Mac’s hair is longer than he’s ever seen it, and he hates that the reason is because the kid is still trying to hide the fading scars on his neck, but it makes him look sort of like a rebellious teenager. 

“What did I miss?” Mac asks, sitting up slightly. The blankets fall off his shoulders, and Jack cringes at how overly large the hospital gown looks on him.  _ Are those things supposed to be one size fits all? Because it doesn’t work. _ Mac looks stick thin, even though he really does have some level of decent muscle again. Jack bites his lip and looks from Mac to the blankets. 

“We found where the tunnel lets out, some kind of cabin thing that was used when this place was being built. We found the drilling equipment. And we know what was taken. A…well, I can’t pronounce the sciency name, but it’s some kind of North Korean pea plant.”

Mac rattles off a word that sounds like what Jack thinks it should be, based on reading the name on the list.  _ Close enough. _

“Yeah, that’s it.”

Mac looks suddenly stricken and panicked. “He stole a plant capable of creating an incredibly deadly toxin. We have to find him before he uses it or sells it.”

“I agree, but you’re in no condition…” Jack says, trailing off as Mac swings his legs over the side of the bed and reaches for his clothes. “Mac, are you not listening to me?” He grabs the jeans and flannel off the chair and holds them out of reach. Mac pouts.  _ Damn it kid do you have to be so puppy-dog eyes cute when you’re upset? _ Jack thinks that look should be considered an inhumane weapon. He can’t refuse it without feeling like he’s being stabbed in the heart. 

“It’s just bruises and a chill.” 

“So a bruised bone and concussion are ‘just bruises’ now?” Jack says. 

“It’s not a concussion, I just hit my head a little. I passed out because my leg hurt.”

“That makes me feel  _ so much better, _ ” Jack says sarcastically. “Mac, head injury is an automatic bench for you. You know that.” 

“I can’t just sit here,” Mac says. “Every second counts now. We have to find this guy and get those seeds back before this whole thing turns into a major disaster.”

_ It already is. The world could go to hell and the scariest thing might still be you trapped in that tunnel. _ Jack sighs. “Fine, but you  _ stay _ where you’re told, okay? Nothing strenuous. Got it?”

Mac nods. “Now can I please have my clothes back?”

“Fine.” Jack sets them on the bed. Mac stands up and immediately wobbles, grabbing the IV pole for support.

“Kid, I think that means you shouldn’t be going anywhere yet.” Jack tries to ease him back down onto the bed, but Mac pushes him away one-handed. 

“It just hurt to stand up so fast. Leg, not head,” He quickly clarifies.

“Great. Yeah. That makes it all better.” Jack can see the dark bruising on Mac’s lower leg under the short hospital gown, and the dark purple and indigo turns his stomach.  _ Oh kiddo. _ “Here, let me help.” 

Mac nods, he knows arguing with Jack will get him nowhere. Jack helps him back into his pants first, then unlaces the gown and pushes it down Mac’s shoulders to pull his t-shirt on. He bites his lip at the sight of the carved letter on Mac’s chest.  _ That can’t heal fast enough. _ He’ll be glad when Cody approves doing a tattoo over the mark.  _ I feel bad for being this affected, when it’s clearly worst for Mac, but… _ Jack can’t help but feel like he’s failed the kid every time he sees that scar.

Once Mac is dressed, he limps out to the waiting room, leaning on Jack’s arm. Seeing him, Riley rolls her eyes, knowing full well he’s been stubborn and Jack has caved. Desi frowns.

“Mac, I don’t think…”

“Don’t argue,” Jack says. “He’s not going to listen. Better in the long run if we let him come and keep an eye on him.”

“I just broke the encryption on a set of messages sent from this computer,” Riley says. “The most recent one was sent to a Ludek Passeur.”

“Wait,  _ the _ Ludek Passeur?” Desi asks. “That man is notoriously hard to get in touch with. He never conducts face to face meetings, and he doesn’t work with anyone he doesn’t know. I spent a year trying to get close enough to earn a meeting, and I still hadn’t even made contact with one of his inner circle before I got pulled for another UC.” 

“Well, that’s a lead. Guess we should be going.” Jack says.  _ Clock’s ticking. _

* * *

THE PHOENIX JET

MORE COMFORTABLE THAN AN INFIRMARY BED

Mac leans back on the couch with Jack gently supporting him, then lifting his leg to lie on a pillow. “Now stay there unless I tell you otherwise,” Jack says, mock-scoldingly, brushing Mac’s hair off his forehead.

Mac nods. He’s just glad to be with his team. He pulls his flannel shirt a little tighter around him and huddles into the warmth of the blanket Jack spreads over him. He still feels chilly even though the jet’s internal temperature hovers somewhere between sixty-eight and seventy degrees Fahrenheit. 

He’s sure he hasn’t fully kicked the hypothermia, even though when the medic took his temperature last time, it was registering only .2 degrees below normal body temp. He can feel himself still shivering, and he doesn’t think he’ll feel better until this op is over and he can go home and take a long, hot shower.

On second thought, maybe a shower will be a bad idea with the lingering concussion and the remnants of his flashback. He’s just going to remember being shoved into walls and cruelly violated.  _ Nope, no shower. _ He’ll put that off for a couple days, and just curl up on Diane’s couch with her soup and Jack’s hot chocolate instead.  _ I’ll be okay soon. _

Up on the screen, the Phoenix logo flickers and then Matty’s face appears.

“Okay, team. As far as we know, Passeur is in Brussels. One of our informants says he’s meeting with his men there planning something, we have no idea what. But as of eight hours ago, he had deplaned in Brussels, and there’s no sign of him leaving the country.”

“Then that’s where we’re going.” 

“Mac?” Matty’s voice shifts from briefing mode to genuine concern. “I heard there was an incident at the vault.”

“I’m fine.” Mac sits up a little more and then grimaces at the pain that shoots through his leg. 

“Jack says you have a concussion.”

“Just a mild one. I promise I won’t get involved in the rest of the op unless it’s absolutely necessary.” It’s the best promise he can manage for Matty. He knows he shouldn’t go back out in the field after that. But…sometimes the op comes first. He’s worked concussed before because he’s had no choice. The Ghost in Paris, the ill fated Las Vegas trip…

“You will stand down, Mac. Stay in the jet in Brussels. Turn your comms off, and wait.”

“I can’t do that Matty. What if they need help?”

“Mac. Jack, Desi, and Riley are three highly trained agents. They can handle this.”

“We can.” Riley puts a hand on his shoulder. “Thanks, Matty.”

The screen goes black, and Mac leans back in the seat with an exhausted sigh. He has the flight time to Brussels to recover. It’s not much, but he’ll feel better soon…

* * *

ALMOST TO BRUSSELS

JACK DIDN’T THINK THAT WAS A REAL PLACE WHEN HE WAS IN HIGH SCHOOL

“Why would you name it Brussels?” Jack asks, looking up from the book he’s been skimming while Mac rests and Desi listens to music. 

“Oh…kay?” Riley says, looking up from her rig. 

“It’s like naming a town Carrots. Or Turnips. Or Potatoville.”

“I’m pretty sure Brussels sprouts were named for the city. Not vice versa.”

“Oh.”

“You knew that.”

“I can neither confirm nor deny…” Jack grimaces when a pillow flies in his direction. “Second one today! What, am I a pillow target?”

Riley rolls her eyes, but a minute later motions to Jack to follow her back to the back of the jet, out of earshot of Mac.

“I knew you looked like something was bothering you. What’s going on?” Jack asks.  _ It’s the only reason I made the Brussels sprouts joke.  _

Riley sighs. “I got further into the computer on the way here. Jack, there was a second set of messages. An untraceable number, routed through what looks like multiple ISP spoofers. Someone went to a lot of trouble not to get caught.”

“Is there a reason you didn’t tell us all about this?” He thinks he already knows.

“I’ve seen this before. Jack, this is the same network that cracked Phoenix last year. The same one the transmitter in Mac’s watch was using.” Jack sighs. This definitely confirms Matty’s theory that James is behind this theft.

“The computer was used in place of a phone to make VOIP calls. I’ve been trying to reconstruct a call made three days ago to an unknown number. I’m going to scan it through the voice identification software Abina and I have been working on and see if I get a hit on anything in our databases.”

“And you think you already know who was on the other end.”

“Actually that end of the call was purposefully distorted, but the computer retained the original voice file for our mystery thief, before he ran it through his own distortion program.” Riley says. “It was deleted, but…”

“It’s impossible to really delete anything.” Jack grins. “That’s my girl.”

“And that ping means I’ve got a hit,” Riley says, turning around to where her rig is sitting on a table. She sits down and pulls up something, then starts typing. Jack walks around behind her, glancing at the screen and frowning.

“Let me put it up for a briefing,” Riley says. “That way you won’t strain your eyes, old man.”

“Very funny.” Jack watches something flash up onto the main screen.

“What’s this?” Jack asks. “It looks like some kind of panel discussion.”

Riley nods. “That’s because it is. The first hit we got on our voice was this panel on the future of Europe’s libraries. We have an 89.3 percent match to a Jules Marchand, one of the panel members, which, for my reconstructed call footage, is pretty strong.” 

“I think our mystery man is more than just a mild-mannered librarian,” Desi says with a frown. “Twin brother maybe?”

Riley shakes her head. “Now that I have a name I’ve been inputting it into the databases from the CIA, Phoenix, and Interpol, and I got a hit.” She turns her computer screen around. “Apparently Jules Marchand has been moonlighting as a master thief,” Riley says. “He’s responsible for multiple high-profile art and historical item thefts under his pseudonym ‘Le Phantome Noir’.” 

“Oooh, I’ve seen this movie,” Jack says. “Except that librarian was a good guy.”

“Apparently Marchand’s double life was exposed when he hit a private collector’s vault two years ago and was caught on a sophisticated camera system he overlooked. He disappeared, leaving behind a wife and daughter who have been moved into witness protection. As far as I can tell from their information, Marchand has had no contact with them. He totally vanished. And only turned up now, almost two years later, in Greenland.”

“He must have been approached by someone offering him this job,” Jack says. 

“As far as I can tell, a year and two months ago, when this phone was first activated, Marchand began receiving texts from an unidentified number that’s been routed through so many protocols even I can’t untangle them.” Jack can hear the tension in Riley’s voice. She’s not  _ lying,  _ she can’t trace this call. She just knows who it came from anyway. 

“Riley, keep trying to find that third party. We’re touching down in five minutes,” Desi says. 

“I can stay and watch the computer. Let me be helpful,” Mac says. 

Riley shares a glance with Jack.  _ If it does work, if it goes through to James… _ Riley gives Jack a glance and then types something in quickly. Jack smiles.  _ Good job, kiddo. _

* * *

THE PHOENIX FOUNDATION

“Why are you really here, Wilt?” James asks, leaning over the table. “I know it’s not just to berate me for what a bad father I’ve been.” The sarcasm in his voice is cutting.

“It’s not.” Bozer says. “I’m curious.”

“What about? Clearly your mind isn’t prepared to grasp the enormity of what I have planned.” James leans back.

_ Oh now we are getting somewhere. _ Bozer can’t let his success show on his face, but he chalks up one point on his side of the scoreboard. James just admitted to planning something. 

“Oh, I think I grasp life in a ten-by-ten concrete box pretty well,” Bozer says, pushing the envelope. “Because that’s what the rest of your life is going to look like.” He tries not to think about how close Mac came to sharing that fate.

“Your agency is so naïve. You think that winning once means winning forever.” James says. “I taught Angus better than that. Past success means nothing. Only the future is worth focusing on. But it seems he’d rather forget that.”

Bozer is beginning to get a very good idea of how the broken boy who rather literally crashed into his life in middle school became the person he is now.  _ No wonder he never thinks he’s good enough. James taught him that pride in a job well done is useless, that he’s only as good as his next success. _ If it wasn’t going to be counterproductive to getting more information, Bozer would be tempted to jump across the table and strangle this man.  _ Then again, that might solve our problems for us… _

He forces himself to rein in the anger. This isn’t the time or place to show it. He has a job to do. Which means he has to keep looking incompetent.

“Well, you’re the one in cuffs, so I don’t think your threat holds much weight.”

He doesn’t tell James he can see the way the man’s hands are twisted slightly. That he’s watched Mac do the same thing right before he Houdinis his way out of a situation. That he knows there was a narrow screw in the table leg this morning and now there’s a black hole. 

_ Matty sent me in here because I’m exactly the kind of person James might tell the truth to. Because he’s going to think I’m too stupid to understand it. _ This time, he allows himself a small smile. He’s going to win. And he’s going to do it for Mac. 

* * *

BRUSSELS

OF COURSE THEY CAME IN THE MIDDLE OF A FESTIVAL

Jack glances around the crowds of people in brightly colored clothes, families with children holding balloons or candy or toys.  _ Damn it, I know we’re mostly sure Marchand didn’t weaponize that plant, but can we afford to take that chance? _

“We have to find and stop Marchand before he hands over those seeds.” Riley is using her phone in place of her rig, which is back on the plane keeping Mac occupied by running random algorithms that hopefully he won’t notice aren’t actually a phone call trace. “I’m going to pull up all the surveillance cameras in the area and get to work trying to check local social media postings. There’s one good thing about this festival.” She points to an overhead banner with a hashtag and social media icons on it. “People are doing my work for me, posting all their pictures with a trackable tag.”

“This is why I don’t have any of that,” Desi says. 

“Oh, come on, don’t tell me you haven’t at least considered starting an Instagram for that dog of yours,” Jack says. “You dote on him.”

“He’s not mine, Jack.” Desi glances around. “I don’t like this. Picking a place this public to make an exchange doesn’t seem right.”

“Yeah, well, according to what I pulled off those messages, these are the coordinates Marchand and Passeur agreed on.” Riley says. “Maybe they think it’ll be easier to blend into a crowd and vanish.”

“Passeur wants this badly if he’s willing to take this kind of risk,” Desi says. “When I went up against him, he was insanely cautious. But maybe becoming the biggest chemical weapons dealer in Western Europe has made him think he’s untouchable.”

“Well, from what I’ve seen, he is. Police can’t get anything to stick…” Riley trails off. “Guys, I. got a hit. Marchand is up ahead, next to the amphitheater. Someone was taking a video of the last singing act and caught him in the crowd.”

“Okay, let’s go.” Jack heads in that direction, and Riley and Desi follow him. 

The closer they get, the more the knot in Jack’s stomach tightens. Something feels off. Something feels very off.

He steps around behind the stage then pulls back.  _ Damn, I knew it. _

He turns around to Riley and Desi. “Well, change of plans. Looks like this exchange just became a double cross.” Behind the stage, a man who must be Passeur, and four of his guards, are aiming guns at Marchand, who is holding what looks kind of concerningly like some kind of dead man switch.  _ Damn it, in one of the most crowded areas here. _

“You didn’t deliver.” Marchand says. “We had a deal.”

“Your former boss had a deal,” Passeur spits. “I don’t see him here. So my deal with him is null and void.”

“He doesn’t do business in person.”

“Nice try, Jules. But we both know where he really is.” Passeur frowns. “Do you really think I trust anyone who is incompetent enough to be scooped up by the American authorities?” 

Jack turns around when he feels a gentle tug on his coat. A too familiar pair of blue eyes is looking up at him.

“Mac, what the  _ hell? _ ” Jack asks. “You were supposed to wait at the jet.”

“I’ve watched Riley long enough to know when she’s just making her computer do things to look busy,” Mac says. Jack hears a soft smack that sounds like Riley’s just swatted her kid brother for telling on her tricks.  _ Hey, it’s not like most of the rest of us would know if she’s only pretending she’s busy to get out of the legwork… _ “And I thought maybe you’d need the backup.”

“So you turned comms back on and followed us. Damn it kid.”

“That doesn’t look good,” Mac says, nodding at the men having a standoff in front of them. 

“Yeah, you got any ideas?”

Mac glances behind him. “Actually, I do. I just need to borrow that man’s popcorn maker.” He runs off and returns a few minutes later with what looks like half the carnival. Jack shakes his head, watching Mac assemble…something. 

“What is that?” 

“Well, you’re going to need cover and a diversion,” Mac says. “Once I get this started things are gonna happen fast.” He hands Desi and Riley a couple of balloons that look too heavy to be filled with air. “When I say, throw these, and then you three take care of Passeur and his guys. I’ll deal with Marchand and the dead man switch.

Jack nods. He watches as Mac puts the finishing touches on his creation, tossing in handfuls of powder and then flipping a switch. He hands Jack, Desi, and Riley each a colorful scarf.

“Dude, I know your fashion sense is crap, but what are these?” Jack asks.

“Put them over your mouth and nose. Trust me.” Mac says. Jack does.

The next second everything is a blur. Literally and metaphorically. The air is full of a choking cloud of smoke that smells like popcorn, burnt sugar, and paprika. 

“Now!” Mac shouts, and Desi and Riley fling the balloons into the area behind the grandstand. They turn out to be homemade flashbangs that explode on impact, and Jack thinks based on the smell Mac found their ingredients at the tent that was selling alcoholic drinks. 

He takes advantage of the mass confusion caused by Mac’s tricks and rushes in, grabbing a gun from one of Passeur’s goons and knocking the man out with it. He doesn’t dare risk shooting in an environment where he can’t see. Especially when his eyes are watering from the smoke. He’s glad he took Mac’s advice and put on the scarf. 

Beside him he can hear Riley and Desi efficiently taking out more of the men. He sees Riley go down and rushes to help her, but the next second she’s doing her signature leg sweep, taking the goon by surprise and putting  _ him _ on the ground. Jack turns his attention back to the fight, and to Passeur, who is trying to use the commotion to get away.

He’s running toward the more crowded area of the festival. People are starting to scream and run, seeing the smoke and assuming the amphitheater area is on fire. If Passuer manages to lose himself in this crowd they’ll never find him. 

“Oh no you don’t.” Jack tackles him, both of them crashing into a booth selling some sort of needlework. Passeur tries to get to his feet, but Jack lands a right hook that puts the man back on the ground, groaning. Jack grabs a long table runner and ties Passeur’s arms behind him, then pulls a paper out of his pocket and leaves it on the destroyed remnants of the cashier’s table.  _ I’ve learned that it’s best to carry around ready-made apologies with the Phoenix’s number to call for damages. _ He wonders if they’ll have to keep all the stuff he just destroyed.  _ I hope Diane likes floral tablecloths. _

“I have Passeur, does anyone copy?” Jack says. 

“I’ve got the dead man switch. It’s disarmed.” Mac sounds out of breath over comms, but also relieved. “Riley and Desi took out the rest of Passeur’s men, and we have Marchand in custody too.” 

“Good. Is he talking? Where are the seeds?” Jack asks. He knows they’re nearing the end of the countdown before the vault’s leadership has to make an announcement. 

There’s a brief moment of sound, and Jack thinks he hears Desi’s voice, although apparently she’s turned off her comms. A moment later, they’re back on. “He stashed them in a cemetery outside the city. Gave us the exact location.” 

_ Go Dez.  _ Jack can only imagine what she threated Marchand with. But it got the job done. 

“Okay, let’s get them and put them back where they belong.” Jack shoves Passeur ahead of him. “Hope you enjoyed your last taste of freedom, Ludek.” 

* * *

THE PHOENIX FOUNDATION

Bozer’s phone buzzes. That can only mean it’s Matty, Oversight, Mac, or Jack. He’s put it on do not disturb before coming down here, and those are the only people who can get through. He tries not to think about how Leanna’s now-useless contact information is fifth on the list of those people. 

The message is short and to the point. Bozer reads it quickly and then looks up. “It looks like the Phoenix is better than you give us credit for, James. We got your man Marchand in Brussels. We beat you at your own game and got Ludek Passeur to boot. Thanks for the help.”

There’s a hint of surprise on James’s features.

“Yeah, I bet it’s a shock, seeing as you apparently had to have been planning to break into the seed vault for over a year.” Bozer is deeply grateful for Matty’s succinct explanations.  _ No wonder she sent me in blind, she didn’t want James to know we were on to any part of his plot.  _ This definitely rattled him. Bozer takes only a moment to delight in that knowledge before continuing. 

“I must say, I’m impressed. I assume Angus is the reason your plan succeeded?” Bozer can tell James still wants to gloat. But he thinks maybe he can turn the tables.

“Mac and his team were on the ground there, they brought Passeur and Marchand in.”

“Really, without Angus…”

“We wouldn’t stand a chance against your plans? Maybe. But your plan almost got Mac killed.” Bozer doesn’t elaborate, he’s saving his concern about that issue for when he sees Mac face to face and can scold him for doing dangerous things alone. “What kind of father leaves a legacy of risking his son’s life?”

“The kind who expects the most from his children.” James says. “I taught Angus to see the world as it truly is. Dangerous and ready to swallow you whole if you will let it. If he’s not challenged, how is he ever going to learn?”

Bozer sighs. He’s fighting a hopeless battle, trying to get James to see what a toxic excuse for a parent he’s been. The best thing is going to be to foil his plans, any that are left, over and over and over again, proving him wrong. Proving that Mac doesn’t need to be ruthless to win. That being alone isn’t better.

“You know, this might be the last time we talk,” Bozer says. “Seeing as it looks like Mac and his team are perfectly capable of stopping your plans without any input from you at all.” 

“Oh, you’ll be back,” James says. “When you realize how much deeper this all goes than some bullets or bombs. You have no idea what you’ve got.” He laughs, but it sounds harsh and wrong. 

“What do you mean, we don’t know what we have?”

“You’ll be back when you understand. And I’ll be waiting.” James says. 

Bozer knows it’s useless to keep pushing. James has given them everything he’s going to. So he stands up, walks out, and as soon as he’s past the soundproof door, calls Matty.

“Matty, I think this has something to do with Passeur.” The way James talked about weapons means he’s probably talking about the chemical weapons dealer, not the thief.

Matty nods, her face tense. “Well, it’s no accident that James led us to him and let us bring him in. He’s playing some kind of long game, and I wish I knew what it was.” 

“Led us to him?”

“The trail was too neat. Too many ways Marchand should have covered his tracks better. I don’t like it, but we’ll have to wait for the team to get both those men stateside before we know more.” Matty sounds tired. Bozer doesn’t blame her. James’s last game ended with them losing Mac for three months. This one…could end with them losing everything. He’s suddenly a little bit guiltily glad Leanna is no longer here. At least she might escape if the whole thing comes crashing down. 

* * *

DESI’S APARTMENT

THIS CARL IS VERY MUCH ALIVE

The moment Desi opens her door, she’s greeted by the exuberant barks of her basset hound.  _ Well, mine for the moment. The shelter says if no one claims in in the next week, I can officially adopt.  _

She reaches down to scratch his ears, then looks up to see Mari at the table, studiously bent over her homework. She’s the daughter of the neighbor across the hall, and she’s more than happy to watch Carlo for the days Desi is out of town on ‘business trips’.

Mari’s hair is currently an electric shade of teal, and her graphic tank top advertises a metalcore band.  _ The minute she saw my tattoos, she wanted to be friends. _ It’s worked out well for both of them. Mari gets to have the dog she’s always wanted but her parents would never approve of, and Desi gets a dog-sitter. 

“Hey Mari, how was he?”

“Perfect.” Mari collects her homework and stands up, shoving everything into a backpack and grabbing a treat off the table. Carlo runs up to her, snuffling. 

“I think he might be starting to get more attached to you than me,” Desi jokes, reaching into her pocket and pulling out her wallet. She peels out a fifty and hands it over.

“Thanks Ms. Nguyen.” Mari pockets the bill and flashes Desi a braces-filled smile. “Mom made a bunch of soup yesterday and I brought some extra for you.”

“That’s great. Thanks Mari. Have a good night, and good luck with that science test.” Desi waits until the door closes behind her neighbor before collapsing to the floor. Carlo whines and waddles up to her, droopy face looking worried and inquisitive. 

“It’s been a long day, bud.” She lets Carlo lick her face exuberantly, but her thoughts are far, far away.

Today narrowly escaped being a disaster due to lack of intel. Desi is the first to admit that sometimes unknown variables are just a job hazard, but she doesn’t like having information withheld. Matty made it clear during debrief that some of those things were above Desi’s clearance level as a new Phoenix operative, but there are still unanswered questions.

She wants to know who the ominous presence behind this attack was. It seems like everyone on the team knows but her. And if they’re going to be facing a monster, she’d like to see its face.

Still, there’s something that worries her more than an enemy she doesn’t know. And that’s an ally she can’t rely on. 

There’s something about MacGyver that’s been raising her red flags since she met him. Things that don’t add up. Special treatment from Jack Dalton of all people. A heavily redacted file the likes of which she hasn’t seen outside of target briefings. And most of all, a nagging feeling that she knows who he is, and that the picture wasn’t flattering.

She doesn’t have access to MacGyver’s complete file, but she does have the next best thing. The world wide web. 

She pours some of Mari’s mom’s soup in a mug and sticks it in her microwave, then opens her laptop and types in Angus MacGyver California in the search bar.  _ God only knows how many of them I might turn up in Scotland. _

The first results she gets for the name are a string of news articles.  _ It has to be the same person, those are recent and the name “Angus MacGyver” can’t be all that common this side of the Atlantic. Or this century. _

Suddenly, as she scans the headlines, the memories fall into place.  _ Angus MacGyver. Convicted of domestic terrorism almost five years ago.  _ That’s why she knew him, the counterterrorism bulletins the agency sent out on a regular basis had him in them for a while. 

_ How the hell did a convicted terrorist end up working for the government? _ She opens the most recent article. It references the conviction being overturned due to new evidence, and she recognizes one of Jack’s aliases mentioned in the article, a ‘Roger Preston’.  _ Why would Jack of all people stick his neck out for a guy like that, even if he did turn out to be innocent? And why does he care so much now? _

She reads several more of the articles, but she can’t find any clue. No connection to Jack at all. He’s not family, he’s not the child of one of Jack’s old war buddies. There’s nothing that connects them before Jack’s alter ego shows up and springs MacGyver from a supermax prison.  _ It doesn’t make sense. _

She’s exhausted, and trying to solve this enigma is giving her a headache. She closes the laptop, curls up with her soup on the couch, and lets Carlo jump up beside her and nuzzle under her arm.  _ To him, I’m home and all’s right with the world. _ She wishes she felt the same way. 

* * *

PHOENIX HOLDING CELLS

Wilt Bozer is a fool. He was so proud of himself for ‘beating’ James at his own game.  _ All I had to do was make it a little bit hard for him. He thought that because he walked away with information, he won. _

Once they go back to Passeur, offer him a deal in return for what he’s been holding out on, the man will probably crack. He has a family, and he has a foolish sentimental attachment to them besides.  _ He’ll agree to any deal that they offer him, as long as they use his wife and daughter as leverage. He’ll want to see them again. _ James has always wondered why dangerous people let themselves have those weak points.  _ If you’re going to have a family in that business, you have to be willing to sacrifice them for the greater goal. _ It’s why he wins, when others lose. 

And when they raid the compound he’ll have to give up, James knows exactly what they’ll find.  _ It’s only a matter of time from when they get their hands on that formula to the time that information makes its way to the dark web, and to the right people. _

But James plans to short circuit that process. He pushes the cell phone a little further under his cot.  _ That guard actually believes that I’ll cut him into the deal for his help.  _ James has never failed to find the gullibility of ordinary people both amusing and useful. 

He’s had this plan in motion since before he was found by Phoenix.  _ Either way it would have succeeded. _ Together, he and Angus could have managed to deal with Passeur. But letting Phoenix tac teams do it for him is just an added bonus.

He can see the whole web of his plan like it’s painted on the walls of his cell.  _ It’s all drawing together and the net is tightening. With Phoenix as the epicenter. _ He will admit, it will be a nice bonus to watch the organization that spurned him burn to the ground.  _ Worth sitting in a cell for ten months. _ He’s been worse places longer.  _ For _ them. Now, he’s going to destroy them. 

* * *

THE WAR ROOM

THEY JUST WON, RIGHT?

“Okay, what’s going on? We already had our mission debrief,” Riley says as she walks into Phoenix. “Abina and I were in the middle of almost beating  _ Fallout _ . Which she is scary good at. Matty better have a good reason for this.” 

“I don’t know.” Jack says. Mac has been stressing the whole car ride over, fingers twisting the buttons on his shirt until Jack thinks he might pop them off. 

Jack doesn’t like the look on Matty’s face when they walk in. “Hey boss lady, what’s wrong?”

“Passeur is already agreeing to cooperate. Giving up the locations of several of his stash sites and warehouses.”

“Well, that’s great, right?” Jack says. “Guy’s the biggest chemical weapons dealer in the area. Taking him out is a big win.”

“Not according to Bozer.” Matty says. 

“What?” Mac asks.

“Mac, I didn’t want to tell you this on the mission. But this break in was orchestrated by James.”

Mac collapses into a chair.  _ I should have told him damnit. _ But Mac was tormented by prison nightmares the whole flight home and Jack didn’t want him more stressed out.  _ I figured since we caught Marchand and Passeur, the jig was up. James’s plans failed again, and we didn’t need to bother Mac with that knowledge. _ He was also grateful Desi sleeps with headphones. 

Mac had tried not to fall asleep, but it had been a lost cause. And the minute the kid drifted off, he was pleading not to be touched, to be left alone. Jack is afraid he’ll be listening to those kind of nightmares for quite a while. 

“So what now?” Mac asks finally. The first one to speak up.

“Bozer talked to James,” Matty ignores both Riley and Mac’s clear shock, “and from the sound of things Passeur being captured may have been part of James’s plan all along. I think we were set up, and he wants something to happen. I hate to think we’re playing into his hands, but I am dispatching Phoenix teams to raid those weapons sites.” She sighs. “I’m not sure who is one step ahead of whom now. And I want you all to be aware and careful.”

“Thanks for the warning Matty.” Jack puts a hand gently on Mac’s shoulder. “He’s no match for us, and we’ll prove it.”

“Unfortunately he’s far from our only problem.” Jack jumps when Patty steps out of a shadowy corner.  _ Damn, that woman is good. _ For Oversight to be attending this meeting in person, things are  _ bad. _

“Okay, just tell us,” Mac says. He sounds exhausted and small and overwhelmed, and Jack hates everything about this whole situation. Prison flashbacks, James pulling puppet strings again… _ what’s next, Murdoc? _

“Jill Morgan came to me earlier today with something she’d discovered.” Patty pulls up a video file onto the screen. “I believe your mystery SWATter is no longer a mystery. We have every reason to believe that Murdoc was behind it, using his son as the one to deliver the message.”

She presses play, and Jack wants to put his fist through the screen.  _ Damn it why did I even  _ think _ about him? _

She stops it after only a few seconds, and in the sudden silence Jack can hear Mac’s trembling breaths. He kneels down next to the chair. Mac looks seconds away from a panic attack.  _ Why? Why is this all happening to a kid as good and kind as him? _ Jack takes Mac’s cold, trembling hands in his own, rubbing them gently. “Breathe, kiddo, breathe.”

Matty sighs. “That video was taken in Mac’s house. And based on the timestamp, shortly after the SWAT team finished their investigation.”

“He got us all out so he could record…this.” Riley sounds like she’s trying not to be sick. 

“He’s trying to force a response.” Jack says. “We need to find a safe place to hole up now, anywhere he knows we might have gone isn’t good. We can’t lead him back home. I’m gonna call Diane and tell her to meet us here, and to stay around large groups of people as much as possible. Riley, call Abina. She can drive, right? And I’ll get in touch with Bozer. Desi too, just to be safe. I’ll have to hope she trusts me enough to think this isn’t a prank.”

Riley stops with her phone in hand. “Murdoc just made a mistake.”

“Hell yeah he did. This time I’m not gonna stop till I’ve put a bullet between his eyes,” Jack says. “He shoulda run for the hills while he had the chance.” 

“Yes, but this…” Riley frowns, setting down her phone and reaching for her rig. “Mac, I set up the wifi in your house as an open network that will auto-connect to any device that comes in, like that IMSI catcher I made in Moscow, remember?” Her fingers are flying over the keyboard. “Whatever it connects to is forced to download a program I’ve had in development. Basically, it’s an advanced GPS system that lets me pinpoint the location of any device that’s been connected, down to the floor of a building.”

“Right. Your ‘3DPS’,” Jack says.  _ That was a good idea, in case Mac got kidnapped, even if he didn’t have his phone, we could trace anything the kidnappers might have on them. _

“How is that going to help us?” Mac asks. 

“Because whatever device Murdoc brought into the house to make that video is now part of my 3DPS network,” Riley says. “I can give you his exact coordinates. In real time.” 


	19. Murdoc+MacGyver+Closure

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Since it's MURDOC this chapter will have some threats of non-con and reference to past non-con as well...  
Also you can blame FlowingRiver for plenty of the evil in here!

###  318-Murdoc+MacGyver+Closure

_ Mac blinks and shudders. He’s sitting in a dark room, and he doesn’t really know how he got here. The last thing he remembers, he was with his team. But now he’s in…well, a cell, judging by the heavy door and the windows covered in grating and bars.  _

No, no, no _ . He curls into himself on the bunk, shaking. For the moment he’s alone, but that won’t last long. It never lasts long.  _

_ He wants to plead for Jack to help him, to come get him out, but there’s no point. Jack can’t hear him unless he’s somehow in here too.  _ What happened? Why am I here? What did I do? _ He doesn’t know, he can’t remember. He can’t remember anything, really. It’s all just a blur and he doesn’t understand.  _

_ And then the door opens. Mac looks up, praying it’s Jack, hoping Matty found a way to prove Mac’s innocence, made them let him go. He just wants to hear Jack say they’re going to get him out of here… _

_ It’s not Jack. It’s James. He’s tossing the packet of pea seeds back and forth in his hands, and something about that doesn’t add up, but Mac can’t remember and he can’t think. It doesn’t look like James is a prisoner anymore. He’s not wearing the same orange jumpsuit Mac is, just jeans and a flannel shirt. Mac shudders. He wonders how their positions got reversed.  _ He couldn’t have manipulated everyone into believing I was responsible for all his crimes, right?

_ He sits up slowly, it feels like he’s trying to force himself to move through molasses. “What are you doing here?” _

_ “I told you I’d win, in the end. You really thought you could beat me? Don’t you remember all those games of chess?” A memory flickers at the edges of Mac’s mind, of the frustration of being eight years old and never even allowed to win a single game because  _ ‘letting you win doesn’t accomplish anything in the long run, Angus. Why should you be taught that the world will soften itself for you? You have to learn to be better. To think faster. To plan ten steps ahead. Then you can win honestly’ _ .  _

_ “What have you done?” He asks. “Where is my family?” _

_ “I’m your family, Angus. And as for that pathetic little team, well, the ones who didn’t give me too much trouble are sitting in cells just like yours. The ones who did…well, the world is better off without snarling brutes like that.”  _

Jack. He’s talking about Jack. He killed him _ . Mac suddenly feels any bit of energy he was beginning to find seep away. He flings himself down on the hard bunk and tries not to cry in front of this monster. _

_ “You really thought you could replace me with Dalton?” James asks. He kneels beside Mac. “I’m your father, and I always will be. You can’t deny blood. Now end this, and come with me, son.” _

_ “No.” Mac glares up at him with as much anger as he can muster. “I think I’d rather stay right here. And I’m no son of yours.” _

_ “Fine. Have it your way. I hope you enjoy spending time with your new cellmate,” James says. “I know he’s looking forward to it.” _

_ Mac isn’t sure when Murdoc entered the room, but suddenly he’s there, a looming presence in the shadows, licking his lips and staring at Mac with his hungry dark eyes.  _

_ “Don’t leave me with him!” Mac gasps, he knows it’s useless to beg and plead with James, but anything, anything is better than being handed over to Murdoc’s whims. Maybe he can agree to James’s deal and then find a way out. Outsmart him, free whoever is left of his friends, fix whatever can still be fixed.  _ But Jack is gone… _ He shouldn’t care what happens to him now. Jack is dead because he tried to protect Mac. He deserves to suffer for that.  _

_ “If you’re no son of mine, then what happens to you is none of my concern.” The door slams and Murdoc smiles, stalking toward Mac like a cat preparing to pounce… _

Mac wakes up with a startled gasp, flailing and thrashing. “Easy, easy hoss. It’s okay. I’m here.” The voice calms him enough to take a few deep breaths and open his eyes to look up at the face hovering worriedly over him.

He  _ is _ in a plain grey cell-like room, but he’s not with Murdoc. He’s with Jack. 

The memories come back in a crashing flood. The video, the realizations of who was behind the SWATting, the frantic phone calls, Riley tracing Murdoc’s whereabouts…

“Riley’s got a final location pinned down,” Jack says. “Just texted me.” Riley’s 3DPS is a lifesaver, but it’s also in early stage development, which meant that she’s spent a decent amount of the night wading through some code bugs. When she hit the first one, that’s when she said it would be a while and Matty told them they should probably get some rest while they could. 

At Matty’s insistence, every member of the team has spent the night in Phoenix secure holding, for their own protection. Even Desi, who seemed remarkably confused about the whole thing, but to her credit agreed without needing too much of an explanation. Just that a psychotic assassin who has a grudge against their team showed his face again. 

“We’re gonna take a team and go after him,” Jack says. “You and Diane and Abina will stay here…”

“No, I have to come.” Mac insists, tugging at Jack’s sleeve. “I have to be there.”

Jack sighs, running a hand through his hair. “He wants you, kiddo. And I’m not gonna take the risk of giving him that.”

“The safest place I can be is with you,” Mac says. “And he’s going to ask where I am. If I’m not there he’ll think I was afraid of him, I won’t let him.” Mac can’t stand the thought of Murdoc cackling gleefully about the fact that Mac can’t look him in the eyes after everything. 

Jack shakes his head. “I still don’t think it’s a good idea. What if he decides he’s done playing and shoots to kill this time?”

“I don’t think he will,” Mac says. “He likes this game too much to end it like that. If I’m gone, he has to try and find someone else to torment and obsess over.” As much as the thought horrifies him, he also knows it’s his best protection.  _ Murdoc likes playing his twisted games with me. He isn’t going to stop any time soon. _

“Okay, fine, you can come, but you do exactly what I tell you, and you do not take unnecessary risks.” 

_ Any risk I take is one I’ve calculated to be a necessary one, technically. _ “Okay.” 

* * *

PHOENIX JET

ONE HOUR OUT FROM MURDOC’S LOCATION

Jack was surprised when Matty joined them on the runway just before boarding the jet. She’s come along before on personal cases that hit home, but there’s something about this time that feels different. That makes Jack feel like he’s being scrutinized every moment of the flight. Matty isn’t just here to be part of the op. She’s here because something is bothering her about it. 

Jack tries not to let the hovering bother him. Even tries to convince himself that she only  _ seems _ to be staring at him because she’s fixated on Mac, who’s been glued to Jack’s side since they boarded. 

He tries to act like he doesn’t notice, like everything is normal and fine. But he knows feeling those eyes on him is making him tense and jumpy.  _ What are you staring at me for, Matty? I ain’t done nothing.  _ He wants to ask, but he also doesn’t want to acknowledge this bizarre elephant in the room.

Matty’s briefing is short and to the point. Matty and Bozer will remain on the jet to coordinate, and Bozer’s job is to monitor sat feeds for incoming threats, since Riley will be part of the tac team. Jack, Desi and Riley will lead the tactical assault team that will storm the location, which according to Riley’s sat feeds is an abandoned railyard warehouse. Jack can’t help but think of what happened in the  _ last _ one, over a year ago now. He’s glad when he hears that Mac will be requested to stand down from the op, and remain in the tactical transport vehicle. Jack doesn’t think he could stomach seeing the kid bleeding out on the floor again. 

Once the briefing is over, Desi has questions for Matty, mostly about bringing her up to speed on the kind of threat Murdoc is, since the file on him she can access is heavily redacted. Jack keeps one ear on the conversation. Most of Desi’s questions come from a tactical standpoint, but he hears Mac’s name come up a couple times. He trusts Matty to field the questions appropriately, but still, he knows Desi will wonder why Mac, of all of them, seems so affected and is being given special treatment. 

It looks like the boilerplate explanation of ‘only contract Murdoc hasn’t been able to follow through on, lasting grudge’, is satisfying her for now. But Jack knows Desi too well to think that once this mission is over, she won’t go home and mentally rip that excuse to shreds. She’ll be back with more questions later. But later, Murdoc will be in a concrete ten by ten and Jack will feel more up to having a cagey conversation about everything. 

He wants to know how much Desi knows. She’s been staring at Mac again, and he can’t tell if it’s because the poor kid looks like he’s going to freak out any second (which he does) or if she’s found a way around Patty’s information blackout and learned something about his past. Or maybe she just feels bad for what went down at the seed vault in Greenland. It seems impossible that that was only a day ago. 

_If we told her the truth she’d rival me for protective._ _Probably agree with Bozer and his idea that the whole team needs t-shirts that say ‘Angus MacGyver Defense Squad’. _But it isn’t Jack’s place to tell her any of it. 

Mac shifts against him, shivering a little. Jack wraps his arm tighter around the kid’s shoulders.  _ He shouldn’t be here. He should be back at Phoenix with Diane and Abina. Safe. _ He understands the need for Mac to see Murdoc captured, to watch the monster who made his life a nightmare locked away forever. But he hates seeing the kid put at any risk of harm. 

He looks up when Matty walks over to them. “Mac, I’m sorry to interrupt, but I’d like to speak with Jack alone for a moment.” Mac nods, and Jack hands him a few paperclips before standing up and stepping out into the aisle.

Matty pulls Jack aside to the back of the plane. “I need to talk to you in private.”

“Matty, this isn’t the time to be keepin’ secrets,” Jack says. 

“This isn’t information about the op, Dalton. This is personal.” Matty motions to him to sit down on one of the chairs. They’re mostly out of earshot of the rest of the team, unless one of them raises their voice. “This is Murdoc, so obviously some things are deviating from protocols.”

Jack knows. Just having  _ this _ team run the op is a risk, given that Murdoc knows them. But they know him too. And the reward outweighs the risk involved, at least in Jack’s eyes.  _ We might be able to get ahead of him this time. _

Matty takes a deep breath. “Still, I have to weigh the best tactical decisions for everyone involved. Jack, I have some concerns…”

“Mac needs this.” Jack says. “If it comes down to it, I’ll have a conversation with him, and pull him from the field. But he wants to be there, and…and he knows Murdoc better than any of us.” It’s a cheap ploy, and he knows it, and he feels badly for laying that card on the table, using Mac’s worst experiences as a bargaining chip. But it is true, and if Matty’s in her big picture thinking mode, then she’ll have to see that it makes sense. If Mac wants to be here, Jack will play any card in his hand to make that happen. 

“It’s not Mac I’m worried about,” Matty says. “It’s you. Dalton, you are making emotional decisions.” 

“Damn it, Matty, we all are!” Jack snaps, then remembers to calm down and not cause the team more worry than they already have. “Don’t tell me you don’t want to bury that monster.”

“I do. But Jack, you charge into these situations without thinking. You’re going to get yourself killed.” Matty looks up at him. “Right now you’re able to think about this op with some degree of logic. But I’m afraid the second we get eyes on Murdoc, you’re going to get tunnelvision. And miss something that’s going to end badly.”

“I’m a professional, Matty.” Jack says.

“You are also Mac’s father.” Matty says. “I can pull you, Dalton. Agent Nguyen has the same training.” 

“You can’t do that. Matty, she wasn’t there for any of this. She doesn’t know Murdoc…”

“Which is exactly why she is a better choice. She’ll approach this analytically.” Matty says. “Now, I am prepared to ignore that rational part of my planning and let you lead this team, but I need to know that you’re not going to do something we’re all going to regret.” 

Jack glances over at Mac, who’s sitting bending a paperclip into some sort of shape. “Don’t worry, Matty. I won’t do something stupid. I can’t do that to him.” 

* * *

Bozer shifts in his chair, tugging at a loose string on the sleeve of his shirt. He feels like he might be sick any minute, and it’s not the fault of the turbulence as their plane flies into a storm over Wyoming on the way to the place where Riley says Murdoc will be. 

He can’t really believe this is happening. That they’re finally going to get the chance to take Murdoc off the board for good. Or at least he hopes so. They’ve thought that before and it’s failed. 

_ They need to put him somewhere and throw away any possible key. _

He leans against the cool window glass, watching his breath fog it up and blur the shapes of the roiling purple and grey clouds. He can’t stop fidgeting, and his anxiety is through the roof. He’s not sure whether that’s the two cups of coffee or the whole situation or both. 

He hears a soft snore from behind him, and looks over his shoulder to see Riley, curled up under a blanket.  _ She’s been up all night, working out the bugs in her 3DPS to give us this shot at bringing Murdoc in. She deserves a rest. _ He squashes the selfish little feeling that wanted her awake to talk to. Jack and Mac are practically clinging to each other, and he doesn’t want to come in between that, Matty is…well, Matty, and talking to Desi seems like an astronomically bad idea given that Bozer is a major over-sharer when he’s nervous and will most likely let some of Mac’s past slip out. 

Unfortunately, about the time he makes that decision is the moment Desi gets up from her seat and walks over to him. She holds out a bag of something with a raised eyebrow. 

“Ranch chip?”

“Nah, I’m good.” Just the smell of food is pushing Bozer closer to the need to jump up and run for the bathroom. “Thanks though.”

Desi grabs a couple chips out the bag and starts eating them. And sits down in the seat right beside him. Bozer swallows.  _ Did she peg me as the weak link? Is she gonna start interrogating me about Mac because this mission feels off to her? _ He can feel his leg bouncing uncontrollably. 

Bozer rubs his hands over his face. He can feel the prickly sensation in his skin that comes with overdosing on caffeine; somehow it’s never gone away even after all the all-nighters and midnight film shoots and draft revisions at three a.m. and stakeout missions he’s done. He’s hypersensitive to everything touching him, even that loose string on his shirt is really bothering him now. 

Desi scrunches up the empty chip bag with what feels like a deafening crackle, shoving it into a pocket. She looks over at Bozer, and he tenses, before realizing she’s looking  _ past _ him, out the window of the plane. 

“I love flying through storms,” she says with a small smile. “Riding out the turbulence until you get enough altitude to punch through the clouds, and then there the sun is, like nothing’s wrong underneath you.” 

Bozer just nods. He’s scared to open his mouth for fear that he’ll start talking and won’t stop. 

“I was jealous when Jack got his first big CIA cover. Smuggling pilot was my dream job. Flying back and forth over Central America in those big tropical storms would have been amazing.”

“You have a weird idea of amazing,” Bozer says. “Life-threatening is more how I’d put it.”

“Adrenaline junkie here,” Desi says. “Or at least I was at the time.” She shrugs. “Cheating death has always been a thrill like no other, and…well, doing something good in the process, while getting to skirt the law at the same time, that was a bonus.” 

Bozer twists his fingers together in his lap, watching his hands shake.  _ She sounds like Mac. Before prison.  _ When Bozer asked him why he didn’t just stop being a vigilante. Why he didn’t try to find a safer way to fight the cartels. 

_ He never said it in so many words. Always managed to use the excuse that it wasn’t any safer to be a cop, and that the justice system was too slow to make the kind of dent in the cartel violence that he could do out there. But I know part of it was the thrill. Being one step ahead of everyone else. Using his skills without anyone questioning him. _ Mac might not have even realized it himself, but Bozer saw the look on his face when he came back through the window in the first grey light of the morning, face flushed from running, hands singed from whatever he’d built this time out.  _ He lived for that, living on the edge. _ And Phoenix is the next best thing, just slightly more legal. 

He realizes Desi’s talking again, and tunes back in.

“This time it feels different, though,” she says. “Going head to head with the most notorious international assassin…” She takes a breath and then leans her head back against the seat. “This doesn’t feel like a rush. It feels like we’re stuck in the clouds. Can’t get on top of them no matter how hard we try, and it’s only a matter of time before it’s too much. And we crash in the middle of a storm.” 

Bozer gulps. She’s put her finger on what’s different about chasing Murdoc.  _ That feeling that we just can’t win. That no matter what we do, it’s what  _ he _ wants us to do. That he’s manipulating us and playing his own game and laughing while we think we’re winning. _

“So what are you going to do? Bail out while you still can?” Bozer asks.

“No way.” Desi says, sitting up a little straighter again. “If we go down, I’ll ride it down all the way.” 

Bozer suddenly decides he likes Desi Nguyen a lot better than he did an hour ago. Before this, she felt like an outsider, like someone he couldn’t trust not to turn her back on them when they need her most. 

“I flew through a storm with Jack once,” She says. “We missed our exfil window and we commandeered a small cargo plane. It was ancient. We got up in a storm over the Philippines. Nav systems went out and we were flying blind. I was co-piloting and I thought that was it. That this was how I was gonna die. But Jack flew us through that storm and got us home.” She glances over at where Jack is sitting with his arm around Mac. “Right now I feel like I’m flying blind. But I don’t think he is. And Jack’s never steered me wrong before. So no, I’m not gonna bail.” 

“Me either,” Bozer says, looking out the window as the clouds clear and roll away. “Me either.” 

* * *

NORTH DAKOTA

STILL DEFINITELY WINTER HERE

Mac shivers when they step out of the jet and are greeted by a blast of snow-filled wind.  _ Of course Murdoc would pick a miserable place like this to hide out.  _ Their tac team is already on the ground waiting for them, it was more efficient to loop in their Colorado team than to bring people from L.A. Officially, Phoenix only has the L.A. location, but off the books, there are tactical teams stationed in Colorado Springs, New York, Chicago, St. Louis, Atlanta, Boston, Topeka, Seattle, and Salt Lake City. Mac doesn’t know the Colorado team well, but they seem to be all business, and he’s grateful they don’t appear to be in a chatty mood.

The team loads up into the two tactical transport vans waiting for them. Both vehicles are heavily armored, although Mac can’t help but recall the transport that Murdoc took out with a grenade launcher in L.A. 

_ But this time he doesn’t know we’re coming. He won’t be ready. _ Or at least Mac hopes that’s the case. With Murdoc, there are no guarantees. 

Riley scans the area for signals as they approach the location. “I’m not picking anything up, and we have a satellite that confirms no heat signatures,” She says.

“Maybe he’s not home,” Jack says, but Mac can see the man’s hands white-knuckled on the straps of his tac vest.  _ He doesn’t like this and neither do I. _ Mac shivers, even though the inside of the vehicle is fairly warm.  _ I hate this. I hate this so much. _ Not knowing, when it comes to Murdoc, is absolutely terrifying. 

“Park here,” Jack insists, when the screen shows them a little less than a quarter mile out from the location. According to the driver, they have visual on the structure now. “Move into those trees, but keep a line of sight to the warehouse. If Murdoc comes back, we might be able to take him by surprise.”

His orders are followed to the letter, and the vehicle is parked out of sight of the road but visible from the main door of the warehouse if someone knew where to look. 

“Mac, stay in the van.” Jack says. “Whatever happens, don’t get out.” He pinches the bridge of his nose. “If Murdoc shows up, tell us. I’m gonna leave Desi by the building doors, she’s as good a shot as I am, and she’ll have a clear line of sight to the van.” Mac notices that Desi doesn’t correct Jack and says she’s better.  _ She can tell this situation is really really bad. _

The team climbs out of the van, and Mac watches from the windshield as they walk across the open space to the warehouse. He can hear Jack over comms saying something about creepy guys always picking warehouses and why can’t they ever be more original, but it sounds forced and strained, unlike his normal banter. Mac thinks he’s probably only making the effort for Desi’s benefit, to keep her in the dark about how close to home this mission hits.  _ Or maybe for mine, as a distraction. _

Once the team disappears inside, Mac retreats to the back of the vehicle, since he can still hear things over comms. Mostly just footsteps and whispered orders now. He reaches into his messenger bag and pulls out a small device he’s been trying to fix for Riley, a signal booster she uses to tap into cell phone conversations. It got wet on a mission a while ago, and he just hadn’t gotten around to repairing it yet. 

He lets himself get lost in the quiet chatter in his ears and the repairs to Riley’s gear.  _ Maybe at least they’ll find a clue, if Murdoc himself isn’t here. _

His phone rings suddenly, and he jumps at the sound.  _ Who’s calling me? _ He glances at the caller ID, it says it’s Diane.  _ She’s probably worried.  _ It’s odd that Patty would let her call agents on an active mission, but then again nothing about this is normal. 

He picks up the phone and answers. “Hey mom.”

“Hello, Angus.” Mac clenches his hand around the phone so tight he thinks he might break it. 

“Murdoc. What have you done to her?”

“Oh, nothing. Ms. Davis is still safely sequestered in your Phoenix Foundation. But oh, my, I wish I had seen the look on your face. I think cloning her phone was my…well, my  _ piece de resistance _ , if you will.” He laughs sickeningly. “I’m sure your big brain is whirring away, trying to figure it out, so I’ll save you the trouble. “See, Diane very obligingly left her phone on the kitchen counter during your ill-fated game night. All it took was intercepting the evidence collector and…well, a little bribe, a few minutes with her phone…” 

“You do realize telling me you don’t have her means you have no leverage?” Mac asks. “My team can hear this whole conversation, and now that they know she’s safe…”

“Oh  _ Angus, _ ” the voice echoes, as if Murdoc is somewhere enclosed and small. “Now here I thought this little rendezvous was going to be just us. But you had to bring the whole family.” 

Mac grits his teeth and tries not to let that voice get inside his head. “I’m not alone, Murdoc. I never was.” 

“Well, you are now. See, I’ve taken the liberty of jamming your comm signal. Right before I made the phone call. As far as your team knows, you’re just sitting in the van eating popcorn and listening to them clear empty room after empty room.” Murdoc chuckles. 

Mac is glad Murdoc can’t see him right now, because he’s sure there’s no hiding the genuine fear on his face. 

“I expected our dear talented Riley to be able to track that phone I made the video with.” Murdoc says. “I don’t know  _ how _ she does it, but somehow, she always manages to find me. So I decided I’d let you.” He laughs. “And it worked so perfectly!”

Mac pulls the phone away from his ear. Even if comms are out, maybe he can text Jack and tell him what’s going on. He types quickly and sends it, but the text sits there, marked sending, with the little dots scrolling endlessly. Mac holds the phone up over his head, putting it on speaker as he does so, hoping Murdoc won’t get suspicious. A call is coming through, so a text ought to send…

“I put together that playlist just for you,” Murdoc says. “The ‘greatest hits’ as it were. Did you get a chance to watch them all?”

“Go to hell,” Mac snaps.

“Oh, well, I suppose it was a little too much to hope you’d taken that home and watched the entire album alone in your room. Well, the next best thing is 24/7 streaming to all of Phoenix, don’t you think? That big screen in the War Room should be the perfect way to get the full experience.”

“Nothing you can say is going to make this worse,” Mac says, trying to steady the quiver in his voice. “They know what you did to me. And I’m not ashamed of it, this is all on you. Not me. It’s not my fault.” He’s not sure he’s ever said that before. 

The text sends with a ping, and Mac flinches. 

“Oh Angus, what was  _ that? _ ” Murdoc asks. “It’s so incredibly rude to be texting during conversations.” Mac shudders. “Now, see, first of all, I doubt Jack will even get that text. There’s so much metal in that warehouse, the signal was atrocious. I had to go outside to make calls every time I came here.” He chuckles. “Secondly, I don’t think they can do much for you.” 

“What is that even supposed to mean?” Mac asks. 

“Oh, that video wasn’t the only thing I dropped off at the Phoenix.” Murdoc smiles evilly. “You don’t think I would go to all this trouble without setting up some kind of insurance policy, now do you?” 

“What have you done?” Mac asks.

“Oh, just planted a nasty little surprise on the Phoenix’s doorstep. Well, not literally, of course. But…suffice it to say, if you don’t do as I say, then your agency and everyone in it is going to be just a memory.” 

Mac flinches.  _ Maybe my team signed on to put their lives on the line for me, but Phoenix is full of techs and office workers and people who should never be forced onto the front lines. And Diane is still there, and Abina… _ He shudders. He can’t let everyone there die. He can’t even risk it. 

“Try to warn them, and well…” Murdoc shrugs. “I hope you said your goodbyes.”

“What do you want?” Mac asks. 

“I know you know that already. You’re smart enough to figure it out.” Murdoc says. “Now, in just a moment, you’re going to get a text with directions to where I’m waiting for you. If you come with me, the Phoenix and everyone in her doesn’t get turned to ash.” 

Mac breathes shakily.  _ After all this he’s just going to have me back in his hands all over again. _ He feels sick at the thought of going back to that life. But…he can’t even consider the alternative.  _ There are hundreds of people in Phoenix. There’s only one me. It’s not even a choice. _

His phone pings with a text. Mac looks down at it and swallows. Murdoc is waiting for him deeper in the woods.  _ Probably been there the whole time, and sat views couldn’t catch him on them because of the trees.  _

“I’ve unjammed your comm signal as well. Now do be a good boy and tell your team not to try and follow us.” Murdoc smiles, Mac can hear it through the call. “I’d hate to have to use those sniper rifles I’ve installed.” 

Mac swallows. _He’s accounted for everything._ _We played right into his hands. _

“Jack?” He says, knowing his voice is shaking. “Murdoc…he called me…he…”

Jack curses, but the next second Mac hears him yelling for Desi to get eyes on that vehicle. 

“No, wait, he’s not…” Mac trails off. 

“Uh, uh, uh.” There’s a sharp crack, and then Mac hears a suppressed groan through the comms. “That was a warning shot. The next one won’t miss.” Mac cringes, wondering who’s down, until he hears Desi’s breathless voice over the comms confirming that she’s hit, but not dangerously.  _ She must have tried to get a look out the door and see whether Murdoc was actually here in person.  _

“Mac, what the hell is going on?” Jack asks. 

Mac rushes, the words tumbling over each other. “He has the rifles, the ones he can control. They’re in the warehouse, if anyone else tries to help me he’ll kill them.” He takes a shaky breath. “He wants me to go meet him in the woods. It’s the only way to keep him from killing you all.” 

Riley’s voice sounds rough and scared. “We can figure this out. Mac, don’t do this. Don’t.” 

“We can’t take that chance,” Mac says. “I have to do what he wants.” If it was just the rifles, they’ve beaten those before. He would trust that they were right, that Riley would get around this somehow. But it’s not just that. And he can’t tell Jack the rest. About the bomb at Phoenix. About how much danger everyone they care about is in.  _ Murdoc made us panic and gather our family there to try and keep them safe. So that this threat would be the worst possible one. _ He feels sick and scared and also coldly determined. He has to do this, he has to save them all. 

Jack sounds even more distressed than Riley. “No, no, you don’t. Kid, we’ll figure something out. We can…”

“This is the solution.” Mac says weakly. “I already thought it through.”  _ Not enough to be comfortable with this whole thing, but that’s beside the point. _ He swallows thickly at the memories of being on the other side of a conversation like this.

_ “We haven’t used me.” _

Zoe Kimura was willing to die a painful death to save the lives of every one of the kids on that ruined research ship. Putting himself in Murdoc’s hands to save Phoenix is no different. 

“No, Mac, we’re not doing that. You hear me?”

“Jack, please don’t make it harder.” Mac takes a deep breath and steels himself for whatever horror the future holds, at least as much as he can. “This is goodbye.” He swallows and switches the comms off. 

He pulls the set out of his ear and sets it on a shelf in the van, writing down the directions sent to his phone on a piece of paper and setting the phone aside as well. His knife, every paperclip from his pockets, and the ones in the cuffs of his sleeves go on the shelf beside the phone.  _ Murdoc will probably search me, and I don’t want him to think something is an attempt to thwart his plans. _ He can’t give the man any reason to say the deal is off. 

Besides, he wants the knife to go to someone he cares about, and not to be kept by Murdoc as a sick trophy or worse used against him to torture him. He scribbles a second little note and tucks it under the knife. 

**_Please give my knife to the Penas. Annabelle isn’t quite old enough for it yet, but I want her to have it when she is. Please tell her I’m sorry I won’t be coming back._** He feels awful for abandoning her and Valerie, and he adds a line telling Jack to send some of the unfinished projects at his house to Val. 

He steps out of the van and walks into the woods to his fate. 

He stumbles through tangled undergrowth and fallen limbs, trying to navigate himself to the location on his phone. It’s just a crude drawing Murdoc must have made while he was waiting, but it shows a line from the warehouse that angles north, until it hits what looks like an old access road that was probably part of the rail line maintenance. 

The air is chilly, burning his lungs, and the damp ground soaks cold mud into his shoes. He thinks it’s snowing again, he can hear a hissing sound of something overhead in the tree branches, and he can feel the flecks of something damp hitting his face. 

When he finally stumbles out onto the access road he has no idea where on it he is. He thinks he took a mostly straight line from the warehouse, which means if he turns and heads north he should reach the spot where Murdoc marked out the location of his vehicle. But he got so confused and turned around in the trees…

He starts walking north. It’s his best chance. And in just a few minutes he sees something parked on the side of the road, a battered brown pickup truck that looks over two decades old. The driver’s door opens and Murdoc steps out. 

“Excellent.” Murdoc rubs his hands together. “I was really beginning to think you’d gotten lost out there. It’s not really that far.” 

_ My feet would beg to differ. _ Mac bites back the sarcasm.

“Now, first things first, I need to make sure this isn’t some kind of little trick.” Mac holds up his hands to show they’re empty. Not that he didn’t think about picking up something in the woods and trying to take Murdoc by surprise. But without knowing how the bomb at Phoenix might be triggered, he can’t take the chance of setting off a dead man switch of some kind.  _ It’s why I didn’t bother grabbing any of the extra tranquilizer darts from the van either.  _ He could probably have rigged something up, but that ran the chance of Murdoc having calculated for it, and he knows Mac too well not to plan for contingencies.  _ I can’t take the chance. _

“There’s nothing in my pockets either. I can show you.” He reaches for them, but Murdoc shakes his head, a hand slipping into his own pocket.  _ Must be where he’s keeping the detonator. Maybe also the controls for the rifles.  _

“Uh, uh, uh Angus. See, I don’t trust you not to have another trick up your sleeve. Literally.” Murdoc says. “So take off your clothes and throw them away.” 

It’s not as much of a surprise request as Mac wishes it was, and he knows better than to argue. When he’s done, he stands shivering on the edge of the road, the wind biting at his skin. He wraps his arms around himself, rubbing at his skin, too cold to care about any potential modesty. Besides, it’s not like Murdoc hasn’t already seen him at his lowest. 

Murdoc walks up slowly, and Mac prepares for the worst. He’s surprised when instead of hands groping him, a handful of cloth is shoved practically into his face. He takes the small bundle of clothing, surprised. 

Murdoc laughs at the shock that must be apparent on his face. “As much as I would enjoy the view on our drive, it might be a little… _ too _ distracting. And I’d rather we didn’t draw too much attention to ourselves. I’d hate to shoot  _ another _ officer just because he pulled me over.” Mac shivers, more from the thought of what Murdoc has already done than from cold or misery. 

The clothes Murdoc has given him aren’t much, but they’re a hundred times better than nothing. He dresses as quickly as he can, which isn’t long given that the only things Murdoc gave him were a pair of sweatpants and a thin t-shirt. The pants are plain, without even pockets or a drawstring, and the t-shirt has no buttons he can use. Murdoc knows him too well. 

“Perfect. Well, you won’t be going far barefoot in this weather, but still…My little insurance policy,” Murdoc holds up a sat phone, then tucks it back into a pocket of his coat. “I do love the communication age. All I have to do is press a button, make one phone call, and  _ boom. _ ” He mimes an explosion. 

Murdoc smiles, reaching into another pocket and holding up a needle. Mac shudders. He knows that too well. The clearish amber liquid inside is the stuff of nightmares.

“Oh, good, you remember this little recipe. I know how much you used to like it.” Murdoc says. 

_ Because you got me addicted to it. _ Mac bites his lip to keep from saying something he’ll regret.  _ I don’t think I’ll ever stop being a little bit ashamed of that.  _ He knows it wasn’t his fault, but it’s still humiliating. He still hates thinking of himself as an addict. Even if it wasn’t intentional. “Are you sure you wouldn’t like some for the road?”

Mac hates himself for the tiny fragment of his brain that tells him at least it’ll give him a little bit of oblivion. That if he’s going to do this, he might as well accept anything that will take the edge off.  _ No. No, I’m not going to do that. _

Because he hasn’t given up, not yet. He might still be able to find a way out. He has to protect his family and the Phoenix first. But that doesn’t mean he can’t find a way to save himself too. 

* * *

MURDOC’S WAREHOUSE

BETWEEN A ROCK AND A HARD PLACE

“Riley, can you do  _ anything about those damn rifles? _ ” Jack asks. 

She understands the stress bleeding aggravation into his voice.  _ Mac is in trouble and we need to get to him.  _ She can’t believe this is happening.  _ This is cruel. Making Mac choose between his safety and our lives. _

“No, it looks like they’re triggered by movement now.” Riley swallows, she can’t help thinking of what happened when a mangy raccoon ran out from behind some barrels. “If I pull out my rig and start typing I’ll be the next one who gets shot.” 

Jack sighs. “Well, we can’t play the statue game forever.” Their whole tac team is trapped in place, trying to remain as still and stiff as possible. Jack warned everyone not to lock their knees, which in retrospect was good advice. It would be awful if one of them passed out and got shot because of nothing more than that.

“I know, but I can’t move. Matty and Bozer are inbound with the last of the transports and a medic for Desi, but that’s going to be at least an forty-five minute trip from the airfield.” She sighs. “And even then there’s no guarantee they could help. We have to get into the control system to shut these down safely.”

“Well, how are you going to do that? Last time I checked you can’t operate a computer with the power of your mind.” Jack sighs. “Damn it, I told you electrical powers would have been perfect. Come on, Chernobyl, you failed us.” She knows he’s rambling because he’s scared. She’s scared too.  _ By now Mac has definitely left. Off to rendezvous with Murdoc wherever he is.  _ She tries not to think about the hell that’s waiting for him. 

“I wish.” She sighs. “Unless…” 

“Please tell me that’s the ‘I’ve got a crazy plan’ intro.” 

“My rig should be powered on. I can…” She stops. “Matty, you can still hear us right?”

“Yes, Riley, go ahead.”

“Get in touch with Phoenix and tell Patty to get Abina and give her my backup rig. Tell her to use the login code T-3-X-4-5-0-C-T-2-1-8-3-5 and confirm with A-R-T-3-M-1-S to bypass my encryptions on the operating system and then enter the number 65 when she gets into the clone network subdirectory.” It’s sort of a long shot, but it’s also how she took down a guy who got his hands on her rig during an op.  _ I traded it for my life, but then hacked him back and turned on the GPS locator signal.  _

“Star Wars?” Jack asks. 

“No, all my rigs are clones. Which means Abina can take over my computer remotely by accessing its clone file on the shared server, as long as my rig is capable of connecting. And since last I checked my Wi-Fi chip was getting signal out here, she can boot it up and try hacking the rifles with it.” 

“I’ll patch you in to Oversight directly,” Matty says, and a few moments later Riley’s able to explain the whole situation to a clearly worried Patty. A few minutes after that, she hears the telltale crackle of a comm set being handed over to someone else, and then Abina’s voice comes online, a little shaky. 

“Riley? Are you alright?”

“I’m okay, Abina. I just need your help right now.” She’s not even surprised when Abina doesn’t need her to talk through uplinking to the clone rig. “I think we’re dealing with a closed system now. You won’t be able to scan for an incoming signal that controls anything now, I think everything has been switched to a self-activating mode. Which means…”

“I need to find the network that links them.” Riley hears the keys tapping. “It is not so different from security cameras.”

“Part of me wonders how she knows that, part of me says if she can shut these things down I don’t mind  _ not _ knowing,” Jack whispers. 

Riley bites her lip, feeling the skin split in the cold and a trickle of warm, salty blood leaking into her mouth.  _ Please let this work. Every second is another second Murdoc has to abuse and torture Mac.  _

“I found the network. I need to bypass the firewalls now.” Abina says. “Once I get inside I can overload the network…” Riley hears her start humming softly, a wordless tune that Riley knows means she’s concentrating hard. 

The rifles power down with a humming whine. “Yes! She did it.” Riley sinks to her knees in relief and exhaustion, the tension bleeding out of her. 

“Get that girl a clearance and hire her on the spot,” Jack says. “Riley, you okay?”

“I am now.” She pushes herself back to her feet, they have to find Murdoc and fast. “Abina, I know this is not how you planned to spend spring break, but you’re incredible.” 

“Thank you Riley. Please find Mac.” And then the crunching sound is back and Patty’s voice is in her ear again.

Riley follows Jack to the doors, where he’s already kneeling beside Desi. She’s sitting up, a hand pressing her scarf to her shoulder. She looks pale, and she’s shivering a little, blood loss and laying flat on icy concrete have not been the best combination. But she’s still trying to get back on her feet.

“I’ll be fine,” Desi says. “Took a bullet to the shoulder, but it missed anything vital.”

“Murdoc doesn’t miss,” Jack says, then turns around to speak more quietly to Riley. “This was a warning. Just like what he did when we crossed him before, to Patty and Cage.” Riley nods. She can’t forget all the times that psychopath has let them live, just because he wanted to _play._ _He’s twisted. _

Jack helps Desi all the way to her feet, just as the sound of tires skidding reaches their ears, and the last transport vehicle pulls into the front lot.  _ Half an hour. They must have broken every speed limit in the state. _ “Sorry Dez. This guy likes greeting new members of the team with gunfire.”

“I’ve had worse. Sorry I’m not going to be there to back you up when you go get that son of a bitch.”

“It’s not your fault.” Jack squeezes her hand. “Go get patched up.” Riley pulls out her rig. She has a job to do. 

* * *

THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE

PERFECT PLACE TO HIDE A SAFEHOUSE

Murdoc glances in the rearview mirror at Angus shivering in the passenger seat. The heat in this truck is almost useless, and the blower vents scream with an unearthly sound when the fan speed is turned up further than the lowest setting. Murdoc finds it unsettling, so he’s left the fan on low. 

He considered giving Angus a sweatshirt, but he doesn’t trust the boy not to find a way to use it against him. So far, he’s been almost infuriatingly cooperative. Not a word of argument, even when Murdoc forced him to strip.  _ I really thought that at least would get a reaction. _ But MacGyver had just stood there shivering, eyes dull and strangely vacant. 

Murdoc knows better than to let his guard down though. Angus being cooperative is never something to be trusted. The last time he did this, he ran off in Columbia.  _ That submission was an act, I’m sure of it. _ And Murdoc isn’t going to let MacGyver trick him that way again.  _ He’s being too quiet, too obedient. Which means he’s definitely planning something. _

Angus’s arms, below the sleeves of the thin grey t-shirt are covered in goosebumps, and he’s alternately rubbing his hands up and down over them and holding his fingers out to the almost useless heater vents. 

“Don’t worry, we’ll be home soon, and I’ll keep you warm.” Angus just shivers harder.

_ Half the pleasure of him is the fear and the anticipation. _ Most of the people Murdoc’s killed have been afraid, if he’s gotten close enough to them to see their faces before they die. Some cower, some try to fight back. But none of them has had fear as intoxicating as MacGyver’s.

Angus tries to keep up a brave face, Murdoc can see it in the way his jaw clenches and the way his teeth sink into his lip. But his eyes betray him every time, that intense fear that he can’t hide, can’t sweep away and pretend doesn’t exist. 

It’s what made him so fascinating from the start. Murdoc has killed a lot of criminals, but Angus is so different. A falsely accused one, who suffered brutality and humiliation as a result. Murdoc thinks he’s the best kind of broken.  _ It’s also why I haven’t killed him yet. I kill for two reasons. To protect myself, and because the contracts I take are on monsters, blights on the human race. _ Angus  _ does _ pose a threat to him, but the boy is so infuriatingly  _ pure. _

Murdoc is fully aware that that’s an ironic descriptor of someone who has been raped possibly more times in his life than Murdoc has pulled a trigger. But there’s something about Angus that no violation can touch. Something deeply, intrinsically  _ good,  _ and  _ light. _

He can’t kill Angus. Not until he’s put out that light, not until the boy deserves it. _When I had him before,_ _I thought that eventually, he would succumb. I was sure that one day I would come back and he would have created some kind of weapon and tried to kill me._ And then, Murdoc would finally have felt justified in putting a bullet between those beautiful blue eyes. But Angus never did that. Never gave Murdoc the chance.

Murdoc glances out the window at the vast emptiness stretching out before them. There will be nowhere for Angus to run to, and this time, Murdoc won’t make the mistake of trusting the boy’s intentions.  _ Not that it won’t be fun to watch him struggle, try to fight back. I wonder when he’ll finally decide he wants to kill me. _

* * *

Mac huddles up in his seat, rubbing his arms and shivering. The air blowing out of the rattling heat vents is barely helping at all, it’s almost just making him colder having the air moving across his skin. 

He can’t help looking around the vehicle for something he could use to solve this situation. Murdoc has almost religiously cleaned his seat and that whole section of the truck. While his own side has a greasy hamburger wrapper jammed in between the seat cushions, some loose change tucked up against the window on the top of the dashboard, a flashlight and a grimy road map in the door pocket, and some pencil stubs jammed into the broken vents, Mac’s side is almost spotless by comparison. The only thing he found when he surreptitiously stuck one hand in the crack between the back and base of the seat was dirt. 

He’s thought about grabbing the wheel, sending them off the road into the ditch and hoping the accident knocks Murdoc out longer than it does him. But he can’t be certain that will be the outcome. If Murdoc didn’t have that phone, Mac would risk it. He’d take the chance of being seriously injured or dying if it was only his life on the line. But if all he does is piss Murdoc off, then anything could happen. 

_ He knows that holding the potential destruction of Phoenix over my head is the most effective restraint he can use. _ Mac will have to be careful and bide his time until he can solve that problem. Then he can work on getting away. 

Part of Mac wonders if this is all a bluff. If Murdoc is sitting there gleefully contemplating how gullible his poor little Angus is.  _ Because how would he have gotten past the security perimeters? Riley has Friar running on all the cameras in the area full time, they should have caught him. _ Then again, it’s Murdoc. And Mac can’t gamble all those lives on a possibility. Besides, Murdoc isn’t the type  _ to _ bluff. 

He turns back to the window. They’ve driven past miles and miles of empty country, almost nothing in sight but grey fields and dead grass and patches of snow. 

“Hungry?” Murdoc asks, reaching into the door pocket, fishing around, and pulling out a granola bar. Mac shakes his head, his stomach is flipping over and over. He can’t eat even if he wanted to. Murdoc shrugs and tears the wrapper off with his teeth, still keeping one hand on the wheel while he eats. It reminds Mac bizarrely of Jack, who always eats his food on the road one-handed. Hamburgers, mostly. 

Thinking of Jack drags Mac’s thoughts back to the warehouse. He wonders if Riley found a way around those rifles. If Murdoc still has eyes on the place. If he even cares what happens to the rest of his team now.  _ It would be to his advantage to kill them all. To make sure they aren’t around to track me down.  _ Taking out Jack, who would follow Mac to the ends of the earth with a bulldog tenacity, and Riley, who can find anyone anywhere on her computers, would make a huge dent in any Phoenix efforts to find Mac again. 

_ He might already have had them shot. _ Mac trembles at the thought, but he can’t afford to dwell on it. Murdoc never does anything directly when it comes to Phoenix. He plays games and devises elaborate traps. There has to be a way out, and Mac can only hope his team found it. 

_ I have to believe they’re out there waiting for me, looking for me. _ Because if they’re gone, he might as well just give in and accept his own fate as well. So he can’t think like that. He just can’t. 

Murdoc turns down a side road with a rambling barbed-wire fence stretching along one side. The truck bounces through potholes and washouts, clearly this is someplace the rest of the world forgot. It doesn’t look like anyone’s come this way in years. It’s a sort of macabre mirror of the road to the Dalton ranch. Instead of well-maintained fences, the fenceline is sagging and rusty and the posts are rotted and leaning at all angles. Instead of pastures full of cattle, there’s nothing but empty land, covered in straggling scrub and a few mangy little wind-twisted trees trying to establish a foothold. And the farmhouse Mac can now see around a bend is battered and worn, although he can tell someone went so far as to repair broken shutters and siding, some of the windows look newer than others, and the roof has a few patches where it looks like new shingles have been added. 

“Home sweet home,” Murdoc says fondly. “What do you think, Angus?”

Mac doesn’t dare say anything. Because his only thought is that it looks cold and dark and inhospitable, just like its owner. 

“Oh, I know it isn’t much to look at from the outside. But I have to keep up appearances. See, the fellow who sold this property to me thinks I bought it for the mineral rights, he doesn’t know I’m actually  _ living  _ here. And it keeps away unwanted company, you see. I promise, inside, it’s very nice.”

Murdoc parks the truck under the shelter of a lean-to beside the barn.  _ Riley can’t find it from a satellite.  _ Even if she could get sat view. The clouds spitting snow in his face when he steps out of the little shelter are heavy and grey, although he can see a break in them to the west, which is where the storm seems to be coming from. Maybe it will clear. Maybe she can find this partly repaired house on a property where no one is supposed to be living…

But Mac can’t count on that. Snow is painting the whole roof a uniform white, no sign of the repaired shingles will likely be visible from above. And there’s a lot of country out here to search. He can’t wait for someone else to rescue him. He’ll just have to do it himself. He shivers when Murdoc pushes him forward, across a muddy driveway to the house. His feet splash into an icy puddle, and he wraps his arms around himself with a shudder. 

Murdoc leads Mac up onto the front porch and pulls a key out of his pocket. Mac thinks about reaching for the phone while Murdoc is distracted opening the door, but it’s in the pocket on the far side of Murdoc’s body. 

And then the door is open, and they’re stepping into what looks like a small entryway, with a closet on one side, and an exposed stud wall with nails used as a coat and tool rack on the other. There’s something large mounted on the wall in between the hand shovel and a pile of gloves. 

_ An electric fencer. _ Mac recognizes the big black box, there’s one in the entryway of Jack’s house, leading out to the barn corrals. It’s a powerful one, Jack told stories about grabbing onto it with his cousin Cody and daring each other to last longer. 

And now it just might save his life.

The fencer has been turned off, with the cattle moved out of the abandoned corrals. Mac can’t even be sure it will work. But as Murdoc pushes him past, he pretends to stumble, and grabs the power cord, plugging it into a socket on the wall. 

Murdoc grabs him and pushes him forward again, but Mac hears the telltale clicking of the fencer coming online. It’s working, pushing current out through the wires to the fenceline. Now, he just has to find a way to use that.

* * *

MAC IS MISSING

SO THIS IS NOT WHERE JACK SHOULD BE RIGHT NOW

Riley turns her computer screen slightly so everyone leaning on the van can see her progress. Jack watches a battered brown pickup drive out of the wooded area east of the warehouse and head north. 

“Okay, well, satellite picked Murdoc up here, but then lost him in the cloud cover.” Riley sighs. “But at least we know the direction he was heading. We have an APB out on the truck, but we don’t have a license number to go with, so that’s slowing things down.”

Jack continues to pace, watching slush splatter under his boots. “He can’t be too far, since we’ve got roadblocks called out on all the local roads and they haven’t caught him. Unless he’s bouncing through the back trails on cattle pastures, he’s got to have stopped somewhere in this radius.” He stops in front of the map spread out on the hood of the transport vehicle, his finger tracing a far too large line around their location.  _ I know it takes time to get units out onto the roads, but that time let Murdoc get even further away.  _

“And unfortunately the vehicle he chose was an old farm truck that has no onboard computer,” Riley says. “Hacking isn’t going to get me anywhere. And running Friar is a long shot, they’re in the middle of nowhere and it’s not like people out here post a bunch of selfies.” 

“But you can do something, right?” Bozer asks. “He’s not just…on his own again. Right?”

Riley nods. “I’m starting a search on any properties purchased around this area in the last year. I’m trying with Murdoc’s aliases, but in case we don’t get a hit I’ve also thrown in some other factors, like payment in cash or unusual levels of electrical activity.” 

Matty walks up, her face tight with worry.

“Tac team’s checking out the road Murdoc showed up on. Our best guess is that he was waiting in the woods in a vehicle that had the engine turned off. Wouldn’t appear on sat or thermal,” Matty says. “They’re reporting in on my channel only.”

Jack nods. It makes sense. Riley doesn’t need the distractions, and Jack doesn’t need to be wishing he was there. _ I feel like I’m doing nothing. But if we get any intel on Murdoc, then I have to be ready to roll on it at a moment’s notice, with Riley. _

Matty’s face goes white, and Jack recognizes her expression as a combination of horror and helpless fury. 

“What is…they didn’t find…?” Jack doesn’t think Murdoc would actually kill Mac. But the psycho is absolutely unpredictable. Maybe Mac didn’t tell them everything. Maybe the deal was that he would trade his life for the safety of his team.  _ And it would be so like Mac not to want us to know that. _ He can’t stomach the thought that this could end the way it started, Murdoc holding the team at gunpoint, luring Mac to him with the promise of keeping his friends safe, and finally finishing the job he started years ago. 

Matty’s voice is strained. “No body. Just a place where a truck must have been sitting, and…they found Mac’s clothes, Jack. All of his clothes.” 

Jack turns away, bends over, and throws up.  _ That absolute monster. That was beyond cruel _ . He can’t help but think of Mac standing there shivering in the woods, cringing away from Murdoc’s hungry eyes and hands, his pale skin turning blue from the cold.  _ That’s going to haunt my nightmares forever.  _

He curses and slams his fist into the side of the armored transport. Not hard enough to break bones, he needs his hands intact for when they find this psychotic son of a bitch, but hard enough that the pain shivers down his arm.  _ No, no, no, Mac doesn’t deserve this. _

“They found some faint footprints matching Mac’s size leading from the discarded clothing to where the truck had been sitting,” Matty continues. “It looks like he was still barefoot when he got in the vehicle with Murdoc.”

_ It’s an effective way to keep a prisoner from going far.  _ Jack’s had his shoes taken more times than he can count, and he’s also been stripped a few times when his captors were really serious about wanting to keep him from running.  _ Works best in cold climates like this. _ He tries to focus on the tactical advantage Murdoc is getting from what he’s done, and not the sickening thoughts surging beneath the surface.  _ If it was anyone other than him, I’d consider the practicality of preventing escape first. But with Murdoc, that was probably just a bonus.  _

“We have to find them.” Jack knows Mac is suffering enough already.  _ Murdoc’s already humiliated him, possibly even… _ He can’t let his mind go there right now. He can’t.

“I might have just done that,” Riley says. “Cross referenced searches flagged a hit. I have a massive power drain coming from this property.”

“Pull sat,” Jack says. “If you can.” 

“I can. Cloud cover’s clearing,” Riley says. “Okay, here it is.” She shows them a large spread, an apparently active ranching operation. The fields are covered in slowly moving dark masses that Jack is all too familiar with. 

“That power drain’s a red herring,” Jack says. 

Bozer frowns. “Okay, why?”

Jack nods at the screen. “Those pastures. See the cattle out there? Whoever owns the place is powering an electric fencing system, probably old school that has a massive draw. That’s a big section of pasture there by the barns, and I’d bet my ranch that’s why you’re seeing that electric usage spike.” He frowns. “And unless I’m very wrong, I doubt Murdoc is the sort to suddenly take up a ranching enterprise.”

“Okay, I guess I’ll stop filtering for electrical activity spikes,” Riley says. “There’s three more properties showing up that have that, and they’re all large acreage.”

“Pull sat on them all, just to be sure.”

“They’re all farms,” Riley says a few minutes later, turning her computer to show Jack the pictures.

“Yeah, but that one doesn’t have any cattle,” Jack says, pointing to the middle image. “See, Ri? That’s real time sat footage, right?”

“It is.”

“That barn is a wreck, and those pastures are empty. No one’s keeping a herd there. So why would they still have a power draw comparable to running a fencing system?”

“I don’t know, but I don’t like it,” Riley says. 

_ I don’t either. What could Murdoc be doing that needs that much power? _ Jack isn’t sure he wants to know.

“Okay, that’s our best shot, people,” Matty says. “Let’s move.” Jack climbs in the driver’s seat of their vehicle.  _ It says we’re at least an hour out from that location. I think I can make it in forty minutes. _

* * *

HOME EVIL HOME

“I do hope you like this,” Murdoc says, opening one of the doors on the second floor landing to show Mac inside a room. “I had some time to learn your style while I was at your house.” 

Mac shudders. The room is like a twisted copy of his own, back home. The things in it aren’t exactly the same, and he can tell at a glance that Murdoc tried to make sure that there was nothing here Mac could easily use. But it still looks so familiar Mac is taken aback. The signs on the wall, the blanket on the bed, the desk in the corner…it’s disorienting. Mac blinks a few times.

“What do you think?” Murdoc asks. “I was hoping you’d enjoy a little piece of home.” 

“What, no dingy cellar this time?” Mac asks, feeling the bite of sarcasm on his tongue. 

“Oh, the cellar is for boys who  _ misbehave, _ ” Murdoc says. “There is one, a nice little root cellar someone dug out years ago. It’s very dark, and quite chilly this time of year. Well, any time of year, really. Would you prefer that?” 

Mac shakes his head. At the moment, he’d rather be in here, there’s more he might be able to use. But he’s sure Murdoc knows that. So he’s a little at a loss as to what the purpose of recreating his room was. But when he glances at Murdoc and sees the hunger in the man’s eyes, he thinks he knows.  _ He’s probably fantasized about what he wants to do to me in that house.  _ And Mac knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that this room wasn’t made for him to actually live in. He’ll probably only be allowed in here when Murdoc wants to…

The click of the door lock startles him. He backs a little further into the room, glancing past Murdoc to the door. The knob is a key lock, and it’s been reversed. The little button is on the outside of the room, and the key side is facing them.  _ That was deliberate _ . If Mac wants to get out he’ll have to waste precious seconds undoing the lock, he can’t just bolt. Not that he can anyway when Murdoc is holding that bomb threat over him. 

“Do you have  _ any _ idea how hard it was to wait until I got you home?” Murdoc asks. “I wanted to pull over at least a dozen times.” Mac shakes harder. “If the back seats hadn’t been so crammed, I probably would have. But then, there is a lot to haul around when you have a child.” 

“Where is Cassian, by the way?” Mac asks. “I don’t think even you’re monster enough to do this when your own son might walk in.”

“He’s playing in the woods. I told him to be home by suppertime.” Murdoc smiles. “You know, raising a child in a place where they can run and play and not have to worry about streets and cars and strangers is so freeing. Cassian loves it.”

“Strangers like you,” Mac bites back. “You’d kill anyone who did this to  _ your _ son.” 

“Yes, well, unfortunately for you, daddy dearest was never interested in looking out for your safety,” Murdoc says. 

“Jack…”

“So much faith in your guard dog. I hear he’s adopted you now. How  _ sweet. _ ” Murdoc chuckles. “While I’m sure Jack would just love to be here, I’m afraid he’ll be too late. If he doesn’t set off any more of my rifles.” 

Mac bites back a retort. Pissing Murdoc off won’t help his case. He needs to figure something out.  _ I doubt Murdoc will fall for the same trick twice. Pretending to give in helped me once, but he’s too smart to believe that again.  _

Before he can do anything, he has to get that sat phone and destroy it. While Murdoc has it, he can hold the destruction of Phoenix over Mac’s head as leverage. If he can take that away, then the worst thing Murdoc can do is kill him.  _ Or not…but if that’s the way out of all this, then I guess that’s how it ends. _ He hopes Jack would understand. He also hopes it doesn’t come to that.  _ Last time Murdoc had me, I didn’t even know who I was at first, and then he was giving me all those drugs. _ This time Mac is clearheaded and stands at least some chance of escape.

“Now, I didn’t have time to admire them properly in the woods, didn’t trust papa Jack and our wonder girl Riley not to find a way out of my little mousetrap, but I would  _ love _ to see your scars now.” 

Mac takes a deep, shaky breath.  _ If this works, it’ll be worth it. If not…well, he’s going to get what he wants one way or the other.  _ As Murdoc’s hand goes toward his pocket in a clear warning gesture of what will happen if he disobeys, Mac pulls his shirt over his head and tosses it on the bed, staring at his bare, muddy feet and the floor between them. 

“Oh it turned out even better than I expected.” Murdoc says. “Healing nicely, of course…but not too nicely. You’re such a marvelous canvas, Angus.” 

Mac swallows down the sickness in his throat.  _ Just come closer already. _ His plan depends on Murdoc wanting to touch those scars.  _ I never thought I’d be hoping someone was enough of a creep to invade my personal space like that. _ But this is the only chance he’s going to get. Murdoc is distracted, focused on something other than keeping Mac in line. 

Jack would call this a stupid plan, definitely a crazy one. But it makes  _ sense. _ They’re definitely out of range for Murdoc to trigger the remote sniper rifles, as long as he’s using the same system as before, and Mac is pretty sure he saw the radio controller in the cluttered back seat of the pickup. Which means whatever happens back there is now solely the team’s responsibility, and he has every reason to believe they’ll find a solution. He just has to get his hands on that phone. 

“My, my, my.” Murdoc does step closer, fingers outstretched, and brushes his hand over the ugly twisted letter carved into Mac’s chest. “This is exquisite.”

_ And this is my chance. _ Mac reaches up, grabs Murdoc’s arm, and uses the momentum to slam the monster’s forehead down on the top of the desk. Murdoc staggers backward, dazed, and Mac finishes the job with a sharp left that Jack would be proud of.

Murdoc falls back against the wall, head lolling. It makes Mac shiver to get close to him of his own volition, he’s half afraid the man is faking and is going to catch him off guard and pull him down. But this is the only thing he can do. He reaches into the coat pocket, throws the phone onto the floor, and smashes it under his foot. A sharp edge digs painfully into his skin, but he barely notices, the adrenaline is flooding his body so much.  _ There. It’s done. He has no leverage anymore. _ The relief is almost physically overwhelming. Mac forces himself not to just sink to the floor.  _ I still have to get out, that’s why I did this. I can feel good about it later.  _

He could just open the window, but that’s a long way down to hard, frozen ground and he can’t risk a debilitating injury. If he wrecks his knee again he’s probably just going to be laying there in misery until Murdoc finally comes around and comes out to find him, and anything he makes to lower himself easily will take just as long as unlocking the door. So he spends the precious seconds it takes to dig the key ring out of Murdoc’s coat and finding the key that fits. 

He locks the door behind him again and rushes down the stairs, trying to remember which way to turn at the bottom. The house is a twisted maze of small rooms that confuses him.

There’s a thud overhead, and Mac shudders at the sound of wood splintering and a door banging open. Murdoc is awake and he’s coming. 

Mac finally finds the hall that leads to the front door. He shoves keys in the lock frantically, trying to find the right one, and when he does, he turns it fast and yanks the door hard.

Nothing happens except a dull pain blooming in his elbow and shoulder from pulling so hard on an unyielding thing. 

_ There’s another lock. Where, where, where? _ The footsteps on the stairs have stopped, he has seconds to figure this out…

His fumbling fingers find the second deadbolt, and he searches frantically for the key.  _ That one’s wrong, that one’s wrong, that one’s wrong, right! _

The lock slides back with a soft thud, but Mac has no time to be grateful, because he hears the footsteps coming up right behind him. He grabs the small hand shovel off the wall, swinging it clumsily. It’s not the best weapon but maybe…

He lands one hit, but his arm is twisted around behind his back painfully and he’s slammed forward into the wall hard enough to see flickers around the edges of his vision. Something sharp digs into his arm and then there’s a sickeningly familiar cold rush of something entering his bloodstream. 

He knows he has a few minutes before the drug kicks in, and he struggles and kicks. One kick finds something hard behind him, and he hears a sharp intake of breath, most likely he managed to hit Murdoc in the shin. The man’s grip loosens for a moment, and Mac twists free and stumbles out the door and down the porch steps, feeling the disorientation beginning to kick in. Or maybe he’s concussed. 

He won’t get far on foot, especially not half dressed in this weather. But if he can hotwire the truck he can get somewhere. Hopefully before he becomes too out of it to drive. And without a vehicle of his own, Murdoc won’t easily be able to follow him. If he can get to a town, or even a farmhouse, he can call Jack for help. He just has to get to that lean-to.

He stumbles, landing on hands and knees in the muddy slush. He scrambles back to his feet, swaying, struggling toward the truck. He grabs the door handle and pulls, but it doesn’t move. Murdoc locked it.

Mac pulls back and then smashes his elbow through the glass. Pain shoots up and down his arm, but it doesn’t matter, he just has to get away. He reaches through the shattered window for the lock and pulls it up, tugging on the handle again…

And then he’s violently yanked backward and thrown to the ground. He rolls over on the muddy ground, coughing and cradling his bruised and bleeding arm. He’s not sure how bad the damage is, but what hurts more is knowing he was so, so close to freedom. 

He closes his eyes as a wave of vertigo sweeps over him, even sitting up is too much effort. He dimly realizes that last time the drug took longer to affect him this badly.  _ Or was that at the end, when I’d built up a tolerance? _ Now all traces of it have long ago cleared his system and his body must have more or less adjusted back.  _ It did hit hard and fast at first… _

He feels hot tears running down his cold, muddy cheeks and hears them splashing to the ground. A gloved hand reaches down and tilts his chin upward. 

“I don’t really need that phone anymore.” Murdoc says, his eyes gleaming evilly. “You can fight me all you want, but you can’t win. You know that, Angus. All you’re going to do is give me an excuse to pull out some of my really fascinating toys.” He smiles. “You’d be surprised what I’ve found around this old place.” 

Mac tries to struggle, but the drug is making his head fuzzy and his movements sluggish. “Now, since you’ve already made it halfway to the barn, let me show you what I have waiting for you out there.” 

Mac continues to kick and struggle, but now it’s mostly on principle. His body isn’t reacting the way he wants, even if he got away he’d probably just fall on his face in the mud.

Murdoc hauls him inside the barn and ties his arms together with rough rope, attaching them to a splintery post in the middle of the room. 

Murdoc laughs, it’s truly horrifying given the blood trickling down his forehead and from the side of his mouth. “Did you really think it would be that easy to get away?” he asks. 

A chill slides down Mac’s spine that has nothing to do with the wind and his damp, exposed skin.  _ What does that mean? _

“You’re not the only one who can invent things. I bypassed the starter on that pickup, and the only way to make it run now is to have this wired in.” Murdoc holds up a small black box. “I mean, normally, I use these things as the trigger mechanisms for car bombs, but it works equally well as a MacGyver-proofing system.” He tosses the box into the air carelessly, then sets it down on a stack of bales. Like he’s taunting Mac with its availability. “Oh, this was a wonderful little adventure. I assume Jack taught you how to fight that way.”

The whole sick thing hits Mac in a burst of clarity.  _ He set me up. Everything about this was a setup. _ Just like that room, Murdoc has organized everything to fulfill some elaborate scheme.  _ He wanted me to try and get away. That’s why he hadn’t tied my hands, why he got so close to me without ensuring I couldn’t fight back. The phone might even have been a decoy. _ Mac hopes he hasn’t signed the death warrants of everyone in the Phoenix. The thought makes him sag forward a little, and digs the rope into his wrists.  _ He wanted me to do something that he could punish me for. _

Nothing here is what it seems to be, and Mac shudders at the thought that he’s been pulled into Murdoc’s sick, twisted mind game world.  _ It’s like that story he said he liked. _ Mac read it in school and he’s read it again since, more out of a sick attempt to get inside Murdoc’s head than anything else.  _ The man who owned the island was willing to risk being overpowered and killed for the thrill of the hunt. It was a game of may the best man win, and he didn’t even kill the hero once when he had the chance because he wanted the hunt to last longer. _

This place is Murdoc’s ‘island’. It might as well be, isolated from the rest of the world with an empty ocean of prairie for miles. No matter how far Mac tries to run, Murdoc will just keep hunting him down. He’ll get a sick enjoyment out of watching Mac struggle and fight for his freedom, only to finally fail and be dragged back to suffer whatever punishments Murdoc can devise. Murdoc will risk whatever he has to in order to make this game go on.

He can’t help but wonder how much Murdoc has thought about Cassian in all of this. Whether the man told his son what that room was for. If Cassian has been warned not to go inside. Mac still finds it hard to reconcile the monster who haunts his nightmares with the man who was willing to risk everything to save his child. It’s almost like Murdoc is two people. Or is just very good at separating the two sides of his life. 

The sound of footfalls behind him drags Mac back out of his thoughts. 

“I was going to just start, but I think anticipation is half the fun, so why don’t we play another little game?” Murdoc says. “I want you to guess what I’m holding. Guess right, I go find something else. Guess wrong, and…well, you’ll find out.”

Mac bites his lip. He can smell leather, and not the sort that Murdoc’s coat and gloves are made from, this leather smells like barn leather; there’s something different about it. He can’t imagine Murdoc randomly pulling out a bridle or a saddle, so he’s pretty sure he knows what’s about to be used on him. 

The question is, whether he wants Murdoc to use it, or find something else that might be even worse. At least this way, he knows what’s coming. He can brace himself a little for the pain.  _ I’ve been hit with a belt before, it can’t be so different. _ He’s not sure he wants to be flooded with James flashbacks in the middle of all this, but other options might be worse. Being waterboarded would definitely be worse. So would being branded. Both of those carry the possibility of incredibly nasty infections. At least whip cuts would be surface level and fairly easily if painfully cleaned. Burns are worse. Lung infections are much worse. 

“Rope.”

Murdoc chuckles. “Wrong.”

There’s a sharp crack, and Mac can’t bite back the gasp of pain when the lash hits like a line of pure fire across his back. Murdoc’s drug cocktail slows down his ability to react to things, but dials up his sensitivity to whatever’s being done to him. It was a cruel combination before, a way to trick his body into responding to Murdoc’s attention while making him helpless to fight back against it. Now, it’s making this punishment absolute agony. 

The crack is dull, not the gunshot snap Jack can coax out of a bullwhip on the ranch. But the pain is unbelievable.

“I’ll admit, it’s a rather archaic choice. And a bit dramatic. But I’ve always  _ loved _ the scars.” Murdoc smiles. “And I’m sure they’ll look marvelous on you.” 

It takes three more lashes before Mac’s fragile control snaps and he can’t stifle a short, hoarse scream. 

That only seems to motivate Murdoc more. Mac can’t tell if the whip is actually hitting harder or if the drug is sinking deeper into his system, but every lash hurts more than the one before it.

It’s so bad he doesn’t recognize his own voice screaming. He can’t even feel himself doing it. 

It takes a moment, and the merciful pause of the crack and thud against his back, before he realizes that actually wasn’t his scream. He raises his head just enough to peer through the tears fogging his vision and the hair hanging in his eyes and see a small dark silhouette in the barn door.

“Dad?” Cassian cries, his eyes wide.

Murdoc’s voice comes out as a breathless pant, and Mac hopes that’s just from the exertion of using the whip, and that the man isn’t actually feeling some kind of monstrous pleasure from this whole situation.  _ But it’s probably the latter too. _ “Cassian.”

“What are you doing?” the boy gasps. “Why are you hurting him?”

“Because he’s disobeyed me and he needs to learn a lesson.”

Mac flinches at the fear in Cassian’s reply. “Is that what you’ll do to me if I get in trouble?” Mac knows that fear. It’s the feeling he had every time James scolded him.  _ When you know what the person who holds your life in their hands is capable of, you can’t help but wonder how bad things are going to be. _

“Of course not. You’re my son.” Murdoc drops the whip and steps forward, catching Cassian by the shoulders. “Cassian, go to the house.”

“You’ll hit him again if I leave.” Mac sees the small boy try to shake off the hands on his arms. “Please don’t hit him. He’s crying.” 

Mac’s stomach clenches with a combination of humiliation and gratitude.  _ At least Murdoc hasn’t managed to poison his son completely. _ Mac of all people knows that having a monster for a father doesn’t guarantee becoming a monster yourself. But it can mean a whole lot of misery.  _ We have to stop Murdoc. Not just for me, but for him. Because if someone had gotten to me sooner, things might have been different. There’s still a chance for Cassian. _

“Please, please stop. Don’t hurt him anymore, Dad.” 

Murdoc sighs. And then Mac hears something else. The crunch of tires on snow and gravel. Someone is coming.  _ They found me. Somehow, they found me. _

“Cassian, go to the tunnel!” Murdoc shouts. The boy freezes, but then runs toward the back of the barn, where there’s a stack of old machinery up against one wall. Mac has a moment to wonder why there’s a tunnel, then wonders if he’s better off not knowing.  _ Old mine? Some kind of bootlegging outpost? Maybe even a place where escaping slaves were hidden? _

Murdoc reaches up for the ropes around Mac’s arms, untying them and pulling Mac in front of him. Mac gasps at the pain as all the cuts on his back are slammed up against Murdoc’s body. He feels a gun jammed against the side of his head.  _ He’s going to use me as a shield to get out of here.  _

A figure comes into view, a silhouette in the barn door. “It’s over, Murdoc, drop the gun.”

Jack’s voice. Mac sags a little with relief. 

“Don’t touch him!” Jack shouts.

“It’s a little late for that,” Murdoc calls back. “Angus and I are leaving, and you won’t be able to stop us, not unless you’re willing to put a bullet in your precious boy.”

“Just do it!” Mac shouts. He trusts Jack to shoot nonfatally. 

“You can’t do it, can you?” Murdoc asks. “You can’t hurt him, not even to save him. Which is why I’m going to walk out of here…”

The next second a loud crack of gunfire echoes in the barn. 

Murdoc falls to the ground, gun dropping from his hand and skittering into a pile of moldy hay, and Jack rushes forward to Mac. Mac can see blood staining Jack’s shirt around his waist already, but it looks like he hasn’t even noticed he took a bullet.

_ He shot the gun. _ Mac feels a little dizzy, a little like William Tell’s son must have felt when his father shot the apple off his head.  _ That is how the story goes, right? _ It’s been a long time. But even if that’s not the right memory, he thinks it should be. Because legend or not, he just watched the real thing.

He starts to say something to Jack, but then notices that after making sure Mac wasn’t hurt, Jack has eyes for only one thing.  _ Murdoc. He’s going to kill him. _

* * *

MURDOC’S HOUSE

IT LOOKS JUST AS CREEPY AS JACK EXPECTED

“Everyone stay sharp,” Jack orders as their vehicles pull into the muddy yard. He can see the brown truck in a shed by the barn.  _ He’s here. _

“Matty, Riley, take a team and clear the house.” Jack says. He can’t explain why, but he can’t stop looking at the barn. His Mac-sense is telling him that’s where Murdoc will be. 

He motions to his tac team to surround the building. He’ll go in alone, hopefully that will keep things de-escalated enough that Murdoc won’t decide he wants to go out in a blaze of glory and get Mac caught in the crossfire. Jack doesn’t know the Colorado team as well as he knows LA tac members, and he can’t be absolutely certain that taking out Murdoc won’t be their primary objective, saving Mac a secondary consideration.

He knows that’s rather uncharitable of him. But the truth is, he doesn’t trust anyone to protect Mac but him.  _ This is what Murdoc’s done to me. Made me paranoid.  _ He hates it, but after today, hopefully he won’t have to think that way anymore. That monster and his influence will be gone.

Jack steps into the barn door and stops. Murdoc is holding Mac in front of him, the kid’s body blocking any clean shot. There’s a gun jammed against Mac’s head, and the kid is shaking. 

“It’s over, Murdoc, drop the gun.” Jack snaps.  _ He can’t get away. He has to know that.  _ But with that thought comes the one that tells Jack maybe Murdoc will want to take Mac down with him. 

The gun presses closer to Mac’s skull. 

“Don’t touch him!” Jack shouts.

“It’s a little late for that,” Murdoc yells back. “Angus and I are leaving, and you won’t be able to stop us, not unless you’re willing to put a bullet in your precious boy.”

“Just do it!” Mac shouts.  _ He doesn’t care what happens to him, he just wants Murdoc stopped. _ Jack tries to calculate what his best choice of shot is. He could try shoulder, but…how is he going to look Mac in the eyes after putting a bullet in him?

“You can’t do it, can you?” Murdoc asks. “You can’t hurt him, not even to save him. Which is why I’m going to walk out of here…”

Murdoc’s gun hand suddenly changes position. It’s not aimed at Mac’s head, it’s aimed at Jack. And in the split second he realizes that, Jack fires. 

The shot is too loud to be just one gun going off. Jack feels the burn of a bullet creasing his side just above his hip, but Murdoc tumbles backward, the gun flying. Jack’s shot went true.

Mac lurches forward, and Jack jumps to grab him, wincing at the condition his kid is in. Mac’s shirt is gone, and he’s covered in mud head to toe. Jack grimaces at the sight of welts and a few bleeding lines on Mac’s back.  _ That bastard.  _ He pulls his coat off and drapes it gently around Mac’s shivering shoulders.  _ Hopefully it won’t make his back worse, but I also don’t want him getting any more hypothermic than he already is. _

“Dalton, report!” It’s Matty, and the section leader of Jack’s tac team, echoing over each other. 

“Murdoc’s down, I have Mac. Stand down,” Jack says, then switches off his comms.  _ They all know what I came here to do.  _ He won’t make any of them listen to it.  _ Plausible deniability, if this ever comes to a court martial. _ He looks back to where Murdoc is kneeling in the dirt, clutching his hand.  _ This ends right here, right now. _

“Jack?” Mac asks. 

“Kiddo, go find Matty and Riley. They’ll get you to a medic.” He doesn’t want Mac to see this either.  _ I don’t want the kid to watch me kill in cold blood. But this has to be done. _ “Mac, go on, get out of here.” 

Mac doesn’t leave. Instead, he walks closer. “Jack, stop.” 

“Mac? What the hell?” Jack’s finger is on the trigger, Murdoc is  _ right there. _ If they put him in a cell, he’ll just escape again. Jack won’t feel safe knowing he’s still alive. And no one will blame him for this. Patty and Matty will back him that this is self-defense. He is wounded, Murdoc shot him, he shot back, all he has to do is shoot once more. No one will question it. “We can take care of this right now, Mac. He’ll never ever be able to threaten you again.” 

“Jack, if I ask you to kill him, I’m no better than him.” Mac’s hands are shaking, so is his voice. “Don’t do this.”

“Mac, what he did to you, what he’s done to so many people...no one deserves a bullet more than someone like this.” Jack knows Mac’s a good kid. That he doesn’t want to ever accept that there’s no other solution. But Jack knows what the world is like. He knows what men like Murdoc are like.  _ They don’t stop until they’re dead. And the best thing for Mac is to put a bullet in that monster’s skull.  _ Sometimes, there is no other way. 

“I know.” Mac shakes his head. “But I don’t want you to kill him, not even for me. Jack. Please.”

It’s the  _ please _ that makes Jack pull his finger off the trigger and rest it along the guard.  _ I would watch the world burn for Mac, and I would kill for him. So of course I’ll spare a life for him.  _

Instead, he walks up and pistol-whips Murdoc, hard, across the cheek. The man falls back into the straw, and Jack cuffs him tightly. 

He notices Mac has walked past him, toward a pile of old tools and some farm equipment in a corner.  _ What is he doing? Making a more effective restraint? _ He watches, confused, as Mac moves a couple pieces of sheet tin that looks like it came from a barn roof, then reaches down into a hole and gives someone a hand out. 

When Jack sees the two dark eyes and the pale face, he gasps.  _ Cassian was right there.  _ He wonders if Mac, from where he was standing, knew that the whole time.  _ He didn’t want me to kill Murdoc in front of his own child.  _

Mac picks the boy up. “It’s going to be okay. It’s going to be alright.” 

“He hurt you,” Cassian whispers. 

“I’ll be okay.” Mac says, even though Jack can see that his whole body is shaking, probably a mixture of cold and pain. “Hey, it’s alright. I’m okay. I got you.” Cassian buries his face in Mac’s shoulder, clinging to the coat Jack’s draped around his kid’s skinny body. Mac reaches up, even though Jack watches his face tighten with pain at the action of moving his arms, and runs a hand through Cassian’s messy hair before resting it there. “Hey, it’s alright. It’s gonna be okay.” 

Jack waits until the door closes before he drops his gun and sobs. 

* * *

The medical team confirms that Mac is mildly hypothermic. Riley isn’t surprised, He’s been dragged around half of North Dakota in apparently nothing more than a pair of thin sweatpants, and then strung up and whipped in a barn. 

It’s the last part that Riley still kind of thinks can’t be  _ real _ . It’s not that she isn’t well aware that operatives who get captured and put in overseas prisons have been subjected to that punishment.  _ Until I joined the CIA I figured the only place whips showed up now was the section in my U.S. history textbook on slavery.  _ Now she knows a few people who walk around with those scars. But she never thought Mac would be one of them.

She wants the medical team to just bundle Mac in a dozen blankets, but with his back injured, they have to be careful. Mac’s currently laying on his side in the medevac vehicle, blankets draped over him and held away from his back with an improvised row of boxes along the edge of the cot. It’s such a Mac move.  _ Guess he rubs off on all of us after a while. _

Mac is still shivering, apparently he’s having a hard time getting warmed up again despite the heated saline IV and the blankets. He’s still muddy, the medical team decided to hold off cleaning up anything but his back and the IV site to minimize chilling him more from evaporation. Riley twists her fingers into his own grimy ones, rubbing gently. His hand is so  _ cold _ . 

Mac blinks up at her, and his blue eyes look clearer than they did last time. He’s been in and out thanks to the drug Murdoc gave him. It’s the same one as last time, he told the medics, so they’ve been pushing the mild pain medication that doesn’t interact with it. His back is raw and the cuts look bad to Riley, but Jack says Mac got off easy in that respect. 

_ “Thankfully Murdoc didn’t really know what he was doing with a bullwhip. He left some nasty welts, and sleeping on your back isn’t gonna be a great idea for a couple weeks, but there’s not much broken skin.”  _

Riley breathes shallowly, trying not to be sick.  _ What kind of a sick monster uses a whip on someone? _ She’d thought that kind of thing died off decades ago.  _ Then again, it’s exactly the kind of torture Murdoc would find appealing. _

She’s seen the ranch hands in Texas split apples in half with a well-placed whip strike. It’s a very good thing Murdoc’s many cruel talents don’t extend to the proper use of a bullwhip. Jack was right. Mac’s back could have been absolutely shredded. 

Jack himself is being treated for his bullet wound. It’s a through and through to the side, which he’s continuing to insist is no big deal, despite the fact that his shirt and half the leg of his jeans was saturated with blood when the medics cut them off him. 

Riley isn’t sure exactly what happened in that barn. She gets the feeling it was more than the official reports will state. Murdoc, who was bruised, battered, and looked concussed when the tac team loaded him into a transport, is still alive. Which is not what Riley was expecting.  _ Jack told us all on the way here that he wasn’t going to leave Murdoc half a chance to hurt Mac again. _ Riley had been inclined to take his side, and even Matty had finally given tacit approval.  _ Jack was wetworks for a while. He’s well versed in solving problems permanently with a bullet. But something changed his mind. _

She’d guess it was Mac. 

She can’t see Mac letting Jack shoot anyone, not even Murdoc, in cold blood. In the middle of a fight, Mac accepts that there might be casualties, that there’s an ‘us-or-them’ level of urgency. But letting Jack play judge, jury, and executioner in that barn, with Murdoc unarmed and wounded, isn’t Mac’s way. 

Riley honestly can’t say that if their positions were reversed, if she instead of Mac was facing down someone who had made her life hell and almost ruined her beyond repair, she would make the same choice. Like Jack, she’s pragmatic.  _ Would he escape again? Would he hurt others? _ Mac is an idealist. Someone who clings to what the right thing is to do, no matter what the consequences.  _ I watched him break out of a supermax prison in a single week. He could have gotten out any time he wanted, but he spent two years in one because he thought he deserved it. And was fully prepared to spend the rest of his life there as well.  _

She admires Mac for that. For hanging onto his principles even when it’s made his life hell.  _ So maybe it can be a liability in the field.  _ But that’s what he has Jack and Riley for. To protect him from the monsters who want to take advantage of his good nature. 

As soon as the medics are done patching Jack up, he stands up, wincing, and walks over to Mac’s side, sitting down on the floor beside him. Riley watches the medical team leader throw his hands in the air in frustration and then shake his head at the younger nurse who tries to coax Jack back to lying down on a stretcher. It’s just not going to happen, and anyone who’s worked with Jack knows he’s going to disregard orders entirely where his kids are concerned. 

Riley’s phone pings. It’s Desi, Matty probably updated her on the situation as soon as they caught Murdoc.  _ It sucks being stuck on the sidelines, especially during an op as big as this.  _

**Matty says Mac and Jack both sustained minor injuries. Is Jack lying to everyone about how bad it is?**

Riley chuckles.  _ It’s nice having someone else on the team who’s willing to call him out on his stupid ‘nothing is wrong I’m just bleeding out from three different places’ attitude. _

**He got a through and through to the side. Missed anything vital, he’s going to need to get it fully cleaned and patched in medical but he’ll live.**

She can almost see Desi’s eyeroll in the return message.

**Of course that’s in the Dalton category of ‘minor injury’. And Mac?**

Riley isn’t sure she knows how to answer that. She just stares at the text on the screen, wondering how to tell Desi any of it.  _ At least both Mac and the medical team confirmed Murdoc didn’t… _ She can’t imagine how bad that would be.  _ Having to tell her that would probably bring Mac’s whole house of cards crashing down. _

“Mac?” She whispers. “Desi’s texting me asking about you. What do you want me to tell her?”

“We’re all going to be stuck in medical together, she’s going to find out sooner or later,” Mac says. “Just tell her the truth.” Riley can sense what he’s thinking.  _ Not telling her, and skirting around the truth, is going to make her wonder and come up with worst case scenarios. Better she knows than guesses.  _

Riley’s fingers hover over the keyboard, and she quickly types,  **Murdoc whipped him** , and hits send before she can regret it.  _ Mac is right, if we don’t tell her the truth and in a reasonable amount of time she’ll assume there’s something to hide. _ Hopefully Desi will take the hesitation to respond as horror and shock at the brutality Murdoc is capable of.  _ She doesn’t know the half of it. _

The text back is a almost immediate and very sloppy.  _ Yeah, she’s definitely pissed. _ Probably also rather stunned.  _ I was too when I saw Mac’s back.  _

**What iknd of sick bastard does that?? Jack’s proably mad he didn’t get to shoot him rihgt? **

**Yeah.**

Not for the first time, she wishes they could tell Desi the truth.  _ She’d go total defensive mama bear on anyone who so much as tried to lay a finger on Mac, and he can use all the people like that around him he can get. _ But it is Mac’s choice when and if to tell her. 

**Can PT for this shoulder be punching that SOB’s face? **

Riley actually laughs. 

“What’s so funny?” Jack asks.

“Desi just asked if her PT regiment can include using Murdoc as a punching bag.”

“Tell her to get in line,” Jack says. 

“You know what, I will.” Riley picks up her phone. 

**Jack says to take a number. **

**Fine. Mac has first dibs I guess. But Jack is gonna have to fight me for second. **

* * *

PHOENIX MEDICAL

NOT MAC’S FAVORITE PLACE BUT IT BEATS A DRAFTY BARN

Mac shivers. He has blankets pulled up to his waist, but he doesn’t think he’s ever going to get used to how exposed and vulnerable he feels in a hospital gown. Especially when the back has been left open to let his wounds close, and he’s laying facedown on his bed. 

It’s less scary with Jack here, he knows Jack won’t let anyone hurt him. But he still doesn’t really want to go to sleep. 

Jack is sitting in a chair beside his bed, one hand resting gently on an undamaged part of Mac’s shoulder. According to the medical team,  _ and apparently I’m not their first flogging victim which is a horrifying thought,  _ none of the cuts have gone deep enough to give them concerns about permanent muscle damage. They probably will scar, and he’s going to have to have Jack do scar mobilization on them for a while so they don’t interfere with his range of movement, but he’ll just have to live with that. It could be worse. It could be so much worse. 

He’s just glad the only thing Murdoc did was torture him. Every time he closes his eyes he sees that sick copy of his room. And he keeps thinking about what Murdoc was planning to do to him. Jack’s presence is grounding and reassuring, and he leans into it. 

Jack has continuously refused to follow medical’s insistence he have a bed, and Mac is convinced he’s doing it to make Desi, who  _ is _ confined to her bed, jealous.  _ She doesn’t have the seniority yet to piss off medical the way Jack does.  _ They’d managed to argue her into a bed before Mac and Jack arrived, and seeing Jack sitting in a chair seems to be annoying her, Mac’s seen a couple balled up Kleenex fly in Jack’s direction when the nurse is making rounds on the other side of the room. 

Desi’s arm is in a sling, but she looks otherwise fine. Their two beds are separated by a curtain, but it’s been half pushed back so that she and Jack can talk, and presumably also so Jack can taunt her with his chair. Mac has been half-dozing while listening to them. He’s still trying to shake the last of Murdoc’s drug; the initial effects wear off fairly fast but the disorientation and drowsiness last hours. Especially when he no longer has a tolerance for it. He hopes once that wears off and he can also get off the pain meds, his brain will stop wandering to all the worst places it can go. 

He’d like to sleep somewhere other than here, but he’s not sure he’ll be allowed to. Medical staff wants to keep an eye on him and make sure he doesn’t tear his deeper cuts open again, especially if he has nightmares and thrashes around. He understands, he just doesn’t really want to be here.  _ Jack could keep an eye on me, it would probably be better than a person I don’t know as well trying to pull me out of a nightmare. _ He wonders if he can convince Dr. Grey. 

The door opens and Patty walks in, flanked by Matty and Riley, with Bozer trailing behind. Beside him, Mac hears Desi sitting up a little straighter. 

Patty stops in front of the beds, and Mac turns his head as much as he can to see her. 

“Thanks to your information, Mac, we swept the entire building for the bomb you said had been left here. Our techs found Murdoc’s device and disarmed it. It seems he made it past Riley’s facial rec perimeter by posing as the mailman.” 

Mac nods. When he’d told Jack the second half of Murdoc’s blackmail material, he’d thought Jack was going to put his fist through the side of their medevac.  _ He was right, even for Murdoc that was low. But I think he knew it was the only way he was going to convince me to do what he wanted. _

“It looks like Murdoc has managed to put half your team into medical, but I think given the circumstances we can say we got off easy.” Mac sees Patty rub her own shoulder, where over two years ago one of Murdoc’s rifles took her down. Mac’s grateful that when she looks over at him, she’s at the wrong angle for him to see her face. He doesn’t want to see the shock or pity.  _ I know it looks bad.  _

“Jack, your file says you should be cleared to return home as soon as you want, on the condition that you avoid strenuous activity.” Jack looks like he withers a little under Patty’s glare.  _ He knows she knows he’s going to push the envelope on that as far as he can.  _

“Mac, I assume Jack’s planning to handle the aftercare for your injuries.” Mac just nods. He can’t stomach the thought of a stranger’s hands on his skin like that. Not so soon after everything. 

“Desi? How’s the shoulder?”

“Just a flesh wound.”

Patty nods. “Murdoc seems to have a thing for shoulders.” Mac shudders, thinking of the marks on his own, barely concealed by the hospital gown. 

Desi starts to shrug then clearly realizes that’s a terrible idea. “The worst thing is I’m gonna have to get my ink touched up there when it heals.” 

Mac manages a weak chuckle. She sounds so much like Jack at times like this. 

“I think we can consider it safe for you two to go back to your house.” Patty says, turning back to Mac and Jack. “Since we’ve confirmed Murdoc was behind the SWATting, and now that he’s behind bars, your place is as reasonably safe as ever.” She smiles. “Actually safer. I’ve had Jill update all your security measures with the most advanced ones Phoenix currently has.” 

“Okay, about that.” Jack shifts on his chair. “What did we do with that bastard?” Mac knows what he means.  _ Is Murdoc going to be able to get free and come for me again? _ Mac has to admit the thought haunts him.  _ If he did he wouldn’t play games this time, I know it.  _ He’d probably cut a bloody swath through the team to get what he wanted, and if he let Mac live, he’d probably at least make certain that the rest of his life was hellish. 

“Murdoc has been remanded to our most secure black site.” Patty says. “And thanks to Riley, all records of his status as an inmate there have been erased. He’ll be just another number on a cell door.”

Mac shivers.  _ That’s not a fate I would wish even on my worst enemy. _ But he will concede that it’s probably necessary.  _ He’s alone.  _ Which for Mac was at least slightly better than being in the general prison population.  _ I’m glad no one else is trapped with him. _ No cellmate, no one to attack in a corner of the yard or a shower stall. 

He wonders why, after everything, some part of him still feels an iota of sympathy for a man who’s about to spend the rest of his life as a nameless, faceless prisoner. He smiles a little, sadly.  _ The one thing Murdoc wanted to do to me was strip away my humanity. And I guess he didn’t succeed. _ Not that Mac is planning to make a personal visit any time soon. 

“So when can I go home?” Mac asks.

“As soon as your IV antibiotic course is finished,” Dr. Grey says, walking up. “Which should be in the next hour or so.” Mac glances from her to his clothes, folded at the foot of the bed. The ones the tac team found in the woods. He’s not sure he wants to put those on again. 

“Want me to grab my old sweats from my locker?” Jack asks.

Mac nods. “Yeah, that would be great.” He smiles. 

* * *

MAC’S HOUSE

JACK REALLY CHANGED THE PLACE

Bozer isn’t really aware of how much the house he used to share with Mac has changed until he reaches for the mugs and finds a cupboard full of groceries. “Jack?” he asks. “Where are the mugs?”

“Mac made a thing to hang them on,” Jack says. “It’s on the wall…”

“Oh I see it.” Bozer grabs three, the one with the periodic table that gets colorful when it gets warm (Mac’s favorite) the one with a bunch of Die Hard quotes (Jack’s favorite) and the one shaped like a fat zebra (his own personal preference) and sets them on the counter, grabbing milk out of the fridge and starting to make hot chocolate on the stove. 

“Cocoa?” Jack asks.

“Of course.” Bozer grins. “I know it’s like seventy degrees outside, but…where we came from, it was  _ not _ .” He doesn’t have to say what they’re both thinking. Mac was like  _ ice _ when the team found him. Bozer doesn’t think he’ll ever forget the sight of his best friend limping out of that barn carrying Cassian in his arms, blood running down his back and shoulders, shivering harder than anyone has a right to, but not letting a medic come near him until Cassian was safely handed over to Matty and Bozer. 

_ I offered to ride back in the medevac with Mac, but he said Cassian needed company.  _ And Bozer was the person best suited for that.  _ Riley was still too angry. Mac and Jack were both hurt. And Matty was handling the whole debacle and trying to make sure something was done with Murdoc right away.  _ He felt bad that he wasn’t with Mac, but he knows Mac wanted as small an audience to his pain as possible. And telling Cassian wild stories of heroes and monsters and aliens to entertain him until a black SUV came to meet them at the airport and take Cassian away. Where, Bozer has no idea. He doesn’t think even Patty really knows. It’s safer that way. For everyone.  _ He’ll get to start over. A new life. Far away from every reminder of his past.  _ Bozer can only hope they got to him in time. That he won’t have been twisted irreparably by his father. 

_ Mac wasn’t. _ He and Cassian aren’t so different. Both of them raised by monsters, then ripped away from what they knew, ten years old and starting over. Bozer hopes there’s a him out there somewhere for Cassian. 

Mac looks up from where he’s settled on the couch with Mickey sitting beside him. “Boze, you really didn’t have to come over.”

“Both you and Jack are walking wounded, and you think I’m going to leave you here alone?” He asks. “Besides, what am I gonna do at home by myself?”

“I hope this means you’re ready to play Yahtzee all night, then,” Jack says.

“I thought you said you hated that game.”

“Mac doesn’t.”

Bozer smiles. 

* * *

NIGHT

WHEN ALL MAC’S DEMONS COME OUT TO PLAY

_ Mac opens his bedroom door and glances out into the hall. He thinks he heard something… _

_ The next second he’s stumbling backward with hands around his throat, pinning him to the wall and making his back explode in pain. _

_ “No…” He gasps breathlessly. “You can’t be here. You’re in prison.” _

_ “As if that could hold me.” Murdoc leans in close, his breath hot on Mac’s cheek. _

_ “Jack!” He means it as a scream but it comes out as a hoarse croak.  _

_ “Did you really think they could save you?” Murdoc asks. “Angus, it’s fate. It was fate that we met and it’s fate that keeps bringing us together. You can’t fight it.”  _

_ He flings Mac down on the bed, and Mac tries to roll away, to find something to fight back with, but he can’t, not soon enough. Murdoc grabs his hands and pins them behind him, the motion splitting open some of the wounds on Mac’s shoulders and making him flinch. Murdoc quickly ties Mac’s hands with a cord and then yanks Jack’s sweatpants off his legs, throwing them aside on the floor. _

_ Mac shivers. It’s colder in this room than it was standing naked in the woods. He huddles in on himself, knowing it isn’t going to do any good anyway.  _

_ He can’t fight back. He can’t, or everyone he cares about dies. He has to lay there while Murdoc’s breath brushes his cheeks and his hands ghost over Mac’s skin… _

“No! Stop!” Mac screams, his composure shattering. At the same time as he kicks away the constricting blankets.

_ It was a dream. _ He lays there panting, feeling sweat drip down his skin and into the cuts on his back. Mickey nuzzles his neck, and Mac buries his hands in the dog’s fur, grounding himself. 

On the cot beside him, Jack is sitting up.

“Mac?”

“Can’t sleep in here,” Mac whispers. “Can we go out on the deck?” 

“Sure thing, kiddo.”

_ I tried. I really did. But…he did ruin this for me. _ Mac had been hoping he might be able to still find safety in his room. It’s why he stubbornly insisted on trying to sleep in here. To spite Murdoc.  _ But I guess I’ve already done that. I beat him, he’s going away to a dark hole forever and I’m free, with the people I love. This is a small price to pay. _

* * *

Jack spreads sleeping bags on the deck chairs. It’s not the first time he and Mac have slept out here, and it will certainly not be the last. At least it’s a warm night. 

Matty told him about the room they found in the house, the one that was a near exact replica of Mac’s bedroom.  _ No wonder he doesn’t feel comfortable sleeping in there. _ He’s surprised Mac even wanted to try sleeping in his room, but the kid’s stubborn as hell. Of course he tried. 

Mac lights a fire in the fire pit and then lays down slowly on his own chair. Jack pulls a blanket over the kid’s legs and drapes a thinner one gently over his shoulders, avoiding the worst of his back.

He settles down on his own chair, but sleep is an elusive thing tonight. There’s no stopping his thoughts and they always circle back to the same thing. He has to ask, or he’ll never be able to stop his mind from going back there. 

“Mac, what you did back there…” Jack trails off. “Did you know Cassian was there? When you asked me not to shoot?”

Mac doesn’t answer, for a long time, staring into the fire. Finally, he opens his mouth, then seems to think better of it, then whispers, so low Jack almost misses hearing it. If he wasn’t so attuned to Mac, he wouldn’t be able to understand a word. 

“Knowing James was a monster...it was a hard thing to live with. But, if I’d watched someone kill him for it,” He swallows. “I would never forget that.” He takes a deep, shaking breath. “I would have been terrified that someday, that would be me.” 

Jack reaches across the gap between them and squeezes Mac’s hand. “Kiddo, I hope you know that you are never, ever gonna turn out like James. Because what I saw you do out there, putting everyone else before yourself, that’s the furthest thing from what he was that I can think of.” 

Mac smiles softly, his hand gripping Jack’s tightly. “Can we…uh, when we’re both feeling better, can we change my room?”

Jack had a feeling this was coming. “Absolutely. You finally saw the light and decided to make room for the masterpiece that is my Telly Savalas painting?”

Mac groans.

“Okay, fine, I guess you’re never going to appreciate fine art. What  _ do _ you want?”

Mac shrugs slightly, wincing. “I don’t know. Just not what it is. You know?”

“Remind me to break out my interior design books tomorrow.”

“Jack, those are ten years old.” Mac says. 

“Okay, fine, we’ll find some new ones.” Jack says. “You’ve got all that visible wood, we could go for a really nice rustic vibe in there. Like a cabin.”

Mac doesn’t look sold.

“Just think of all the plaid we could use. You clearly have an obsession with that pattern,” Jack says, tugging at the blanket draped over Mac’s legs, the one he got for the kid when they were in Scotland, with his family’s tartan pattern woven into it. 

“Maybe…” Mac smiles. “We’ve got plenty of time to decide.” 


	20. Friends+Enemies+Border

###  319-Friends+Enemies+Border

“No, no, no, that’s not even close to right,” Bozer says. “Jack, that frame is more skewed than a three-legged dog.” He proceeds to facepalm, which smears even more pale yellow paint onto his face. “I have spent  _ way _ too much time around you. Or maybe it’s the paint fumes.”

Mac doesn’t think they can blame it on paint fumes, he opened all the windows from his bedroom to the deck while they worked. 

He’s completely rearranged his room, even going so far as to get some new furniture in the process. He’d vetoed Jack’s rustic cabin plan, but Jack is totally on board with the new one, a style that’s similar to the Dalton ranch house’s interior. The warm sunny color of the paint reminds Mac of the sunrises over the open country, and he’s exchanged the retro signs and neon lights for a collection of stuff Jack’s Momma sent with him on his last visit to get it out of the attic, that they’d never quite gotten around to hanging up. 

He’s rearranged the furniture as much as possible, although the bed and the desk, after much deliberation, are still in mostly their original locations, since anything else was just awkward. The dresser is now right by the door to the bathroom, a development Mac can’t understand how he didn’t come up with a long time ago; this way doesn’t require him walking past his windows half-dressed when he forgets to take clean clothes with him. 

On the whole, though, the room now looks very different from the way it did when Murdoc copied it. Mac is sure he’ll stub his toe on furniture in the dark for about three months before he gets used to this, but it’s better than nightmares. 

Jack had offered to switch rooms, but Mac had turned that down. He wasn’t going to let a monster who is now sitting in a dark hole somewhere mess with his life that much. Redecorating is something he can pretend was his choice completely. 

It’s still hard to believe the nightmare is over, that Murdoc is behind bars. They’ve been trying to put him there for so long. It’s a relief, but also somehow still disconcerting. The last time Murdoc let them catch him, it was because he wanted to get caught. Mac hopes this time wasn’t the same. 

But he can’t let himself keep thinking about that, or he’ll give himself a panic attack over something that might never even happen. For now, he’s safe and with his family, and the only damage Murdoc left him with are a few more scars. 

Thinking about them makes his back twinge in pain.  _ Apparently everything is healing nicely, or as nicely as whipping scars can. _ Jack’s been following the treatment regimen that will keep the scars from tightening up and limiting Mac’s range of motion, and so far it seems to be working. He’s glad the lashes weren’t deeper. According to Dr. Grey, they will scar, but it won’t be the gory mess Mac was imagining. Just some off-color lines on his skin if all goes well. It felt so much worse. Like his whole back was a mangled, shredded ruin. He can’t imagine what it would be like if that was the case. 

It still sort of feels unreal. Even for Murdoc, who Mac knows all too well is fond of creative and vicious torture methods.  _ I didn’t think that would ever actually happen to me. _ He knows logically that it’s no worse than any other torture, that technically it’s not even going to be as bad as being stabbed or shot or even burned. But somehow it feels  _ so  _ much worse. Maybe because as sick as it is, he can expect certain kinds of injury in the field. Knives and guns are things agents encounter on a regular basis. A whip is both unexpected and somehow feels a lot more humiliating. He never wants to have to explain those scars. 

He knows he’s shying away from the real reason he hates it so much. From the memories of James’s belt, and the welts that never really scarred but hurt  _ so _ much whenever he leaned back in a chair or bent over to tie his shoes. 

Being shot or stabbed or beaten, even electrocuted and waterboarded, Mac can deal with. Those are more or less unrelated to James in any way. Getting hit was a problem for a while, but after a few months as a vigilante it became more or less part of his daily routine to take a few punches. But he hasn’t been anything close to whipped since the last time James got mad enough to take a belt to him. 

His phone buzzes, and he pulls it out. 

**Riley: Got Pizza for everyone, on my way back. Need anything else?**

Mac smiles, then replies that they don’t, Jack and Bozer  _ each _ separately bought enough easy-to-install (or at least advertised as such) wall hangers to set up an art gallery, and more painting supplies are no longer needed, they finished the second coat on the last wall today. 

He’s been talking to Riley a lot lately. She’s the only other member of his family that can relate to memories of abusive family members popping up when they’re least wanted. Unlike Mac, she’s never experienced the more calculated rage like James used, making sure the punishments were going to hide the damage. Elwood had hit her indiscriminately, mostly when he was drunk out of his mind. For her, bar brawls, with the punches interspersed with the smell of alcohol, are a major trigger. 

He’s glad Riley’s here. While he would never wish a childhood like that on anyone, he appreciates the way she’s been able to relate to him. It’s not something people can truly understand unless they’ve experienced it. Riley knows how hard it is to even take the first step of admitting that abuse happened. 

He’s told Jack some of it. Less than he’s told Riley. He can see how angry hearing about James’s abuse makes Jack, and going down to the man’s cell and beating him up has been vetoed in no uncertain terms by Patty. He doesn’t like making Jack angry without giving him an outlet for it. Especially since Jack hasn’t been allowed to run or strenuously work out while his side is healing. 

Sometimes it’s impossible not to share things, like when Jack has to come in and wake him up out of a nightmare. And he knows Jack wants to know about it, that he cares and just wants to make sure he won’t unintentionally do something to hurt Mac. But it’s still hard to tell him when he watches Jack sit there and slam his fist into his hand and know the man is imagining slamming it into James’s cheek. 

The doorbell rings and Mickey dashes to the front of the house, barking. Mac wipes a paint-stained hand on his jeans and walks up to open it, checking through the window beside it first to make sure the person there is a friendly. Riley is standing there, balancing a stack of pizza boxes and two bottles of soda on one knee, with one hand, the other half-holding the stack, and her elbow pressing the doorbell. 

“That’s a lot of pizza, Riley.”

“Figured you all would be hungry after moving the furniture.” She walks inside and sets everything on the living room table. “I invited Desi to come by after her PT, hope you guys are good with that?”

“Sure thing,” Jack says, walking out. “I need to give her grief about getting out of the heavy lifting.” 

“Heavy lifting?” Riley asks. “Jack, you got out of that too. Bozer and I pulled all of that furniture around and you know it.” 

“Well, I supervised. That’s an important job, you know.” Jack says, puffing out his chest and grabbing a glass from the cupboard. “Someone had to keep everything moving.” 

Bozer groans. “Well, I personally would like to stop moving right now. So would my back.” He collapses onto the couch and opens one of the pizza boxes. “Oooh meat lovers.” 

“I got plates,” Mac says. It’s good for him to be reaching and grabbing things now, keeping his scars moving. Heavy lifting was out of the question, but a stack of plates is fine. He’s just set them on the table when the doorbell rings again. 

This time Riley opens it, and lets in Desi. There’s a conspicuous lack of a sling on her arm, but no one comments on that. It doesn’t seem like a good idea. It never is to point out similar things to Jack. 

She sits down in a chair and Mickey rushes up, sniffing her hands until she pulls a dog treat out of a pocket. Carlo is officially Desi’s dog now, and while she can’t take him with her to PT with her, she’s brought him over to the house several times. Mickey loves the company, he clearly made fast friends with Carlo and despite the size difference the two get along great. 

“You spoil him,” Mac says. “He knows you carry the treats he likes.” 

“He’s a good boy, aren’t you Mick?” Desi says. She grins, ruffling the fluff behind Mickey’s ears, and the dog leans into her touch, tongue lolling. Mac’s noticed that since Mickey relaxes around Desi more, so can he. Mickey’s sort of become a secondary vetting process for people in his life, and he trusts his dog’s instincts about who will and won’t hurt him. Mickey is no longer blocking Desi out of Mac’s personal space as strictly, noticing Mac’s growing level of comfort with their newest team member. 

Mac’s gotten a lot more relaxed about the whole thing after seeing Desi and Riley in Phoenix’s gym while Riley was working out and Desi, and Mac were doing PT, one of the rare times Jack wasn’t also there with them, thanks to getting his stitches taken out by medical. When one of the guys from Tac Ops wolf-whistled Riley while she was doing squats, Desi promptly left the spot where she was doing light shoulder pulls, grabbed the guy’s hand with her good arm, and put him in a gooseneck hold that dropped him to the mats with a clearly barely contained yell of pain. 

“Unless  _ all _ you are doing is trying to learn proper form, you keep your eyes off her,” Desi had snapped. “You and I have a problem now.”

The guy had promptly left as soon as Desi let go, Riley had exchanged a raised-eyebrow glance with Mac, and Mac had decided Desi was about the last person who would intentionally trigger him. In fact, she’d probably beat up anyone who did. But that unfortunately still hasn’t meant he’s comfortable telling her everything. Their fragile friendship is getting stronger, but he doesn’t want pity to enter that equation. 

It’s nice to have someone who doesn’t look at him differently. Who doesn’t think he’s the weak link or act like if something happens to him everything else needs to be put on pause. It’s not that he doesn’t appreciate Jack and Riley and Bozer looking out for him, it’s just that sometimes it makes him feel like baggage. Like he’s slowing them down instead of helping. 

He watches her grab a piece of the veggie everything pizza and lean back in her chair, propping one boot on the table before Jack smacks it. 

Desi gives him a glare. “Come  _ on, _ you were literally doing the same thing two minutes ago.”

“Yeah, it’s my house.” 

Mac chuckles and grabs his own slice of pepperoni pizza.  _ This is pretty great. If only it could last. _

* * *

ONE WEEK LATER

DESI SKIPPED OUT ON PT FOR THIS

“You’re sure this is gonna get us all the way to exfil?” Jack asks as the car makes a particularly strange noise.

“We owe some random Romanian dude a new engine but yeah.” Mac shrugs from where he’s squashed between Jack and Desi in the front seat. “I kind of had to rush the distillation process a little, so the ethanol isn’t as pure as it should be, but we’ve got enough in those jugs in the back that we won’t have to stop anywhere we might get caught on camera.”

Desi chuckles, taking her eyes off the mirror for a moment. “Jack, I’m pretty sure you at least don’t have to worry about that. Your face would break the camera first.”

“Ha.” Jack says, a barked short laugh that Desi knows is him trying to sound annoyed and failing. “I wasn’t talking about the fuel, dude, this thing sounds like the drivetrain is about to drop out in the middle of the road,” Jack says. “I trust you on the science stuff.”

“If it does I can fix that too,” Mac says. “I think.”

“Hopefully we don’t have to test that.” Desi says. “It’s not going to take long for these guys’ friends to realize something happened, and we don’t exactly have the vehicle to outrun them if they catch up.” She nods to the two men currently bound and gagged in the backseat. 

Now that Ludek Passeur is cooperating, they’ve been getting locations of weapons caches all over Europe, and also the names of some of Passeur’s associates. These two guys are supposedly the right hand men of a notorious weapons dealer known only as the “Hand of Death”.  _ It sounds cooler in Romanian, I guess. _

Passeur was a major get for the Phoenix. Desi just wishes she knew more about  _ how _ they got him. Thornton and Matty are being very hush-hush about the whole situation. There’s something involved that’s above her clearance level, just like everything about MacGyver’s redacted file. Desi’s never seen so much black ink, not even when she was with the CIA. But she’s also a good soldier, she knows what she’s supposed to do, and unless innocent lives are in jeopardy, she will follow orders. 

“Jack!” Mac shouts. 

Suddenly Jack slams on the brakes with a screech, and Desi whips her eyes back to the road ahead, instead of the one behind them. There’s a woman with a shawl over her head running into the middle of the street waving her arms. 

Desi can just barely make out the words as the car slows to a stop. “ _ Ajutor, vă rog, a avut loc un accident _ .” 

“She’s asking for help,” Jack says, at the same time Desi is about to speak up. 

“Do you speak English?” Desi asks.

“Yes,” the woman pants. “You must come quickly. An accident. People are hurt.”

Desi looks at Jack, switching to Vietnamese so the woman won’t be able to overhear their conversation. “ _ Có thể là một cuộc phục kích _ .” (Could be an ambush)

Jack shakes his head. “ _ Cô ấy có vẻ lo lắng. Tôi nghĩ rằng đây là sự thật _ .” (She looks worried. I think this is the truth.) He switches back to English a moment later. “We’ve already missed our exfil window and Mac trashed all of our phones, so no chance of telling Matty we’re deviating from the plan. Still, I don’t want to leave without finding out if we could help someone. Mac and I will check it out, you stay with them.”

“The hell I will.” Desi says.

“Your shoulder’s still…”

“I’m coming.” Desi gives their two prisoners a glare. “Stay.”  _ Not like they’re really going to go anywhere. Mac turned the seatbelts into a pretty impressive set of restraints.  _

She can’t put her finger on why she’s so worried about letting Mac out of her sight. She knows part of it is what happened with Murdoc, they left Mac in the van thinking it would keep him safe, and it only made things so much worse. How much worse, no one will exactly tell her.  _ If they didn’t bother to hedge about Murdoc using a whip on him, something worse happened. _ She isn’t sure what, but with slime like that, nothing is off the table. She’s been watching Mac closely, but he isn’t acting like anything is bothering him aside from the still healing cuts on his back.

_ Jack is with him. It’s not such a big deal. _ But she still wants to be where she can personally see Mac is not in imminent danger of dying.  _ The damn kid really does grow on you. _ For all his strange quirks and sketchy past, she’s actually starting to get attached. MacGyver is still an enigma, but at least he’s the good kind. 

He’s smart, he’s a good agent, and best of all he’s a good  _ person. _ She’d found out after the op that Murdoc hadn’t just threatened the lives of the tac team in the warehouse, but the entire Phoenix Foundation, if Mac hadn’t done what he asked.  _ He made the choice that protected the people he cared about. _ It doesn’t sound like the person those newspaper reports of his trial painted him as. 

She had nothing better to do while her shoulder healed, so she spent most of her recovery time on her couch catching up on her massive stack of books she’s been planning on reading, and combing through the news reports about the vigilante ‘the Phoenix’. 

Up until his arrest for terrorism, the media had loved the story of a lone hero against the cartel violence. And then they turned on him like a pack of starving wolves. She of all people knows that what someone says about you doesn’t necessarily mean it’s true, and she feels badly for having let those reports color her perception of Mac. 

“What happened?” Mac asks as they stumble along a deeply rutted side road. 

The woman answers, her English surprisingly good, if heavily accented. “My husband and I are farmers. We were on our way to town this morning. We found a place where the road fell down. There is a van down there with people inside. At least one man is badly hurt.” 

“Okay.” Mac’s shoulders are tense. Desi wonders if he’s worried about this actually being a trap, or if he’s just worried about those people. Probably the latter. Mac seems to throw all caution to the wind when someone needs help. 

“There,” The woman says, pointing ahead of them to where a blue pickup is parked in the middle of the road. A man is kneeling next to it, looking down into a deep sinkhole in the ground.

“Pass her up to me!” He shouts, and there’s the sound of someone below grunting and straining.

“Too far!” a voice shouts back.  _ That’s not a Romanian accent, that’s Syrian. _ Desi spent enough time in-country that she recognizes that. 

She steps up beside Mac and Jack and the farmer to look down into the hole. A man is just setting a girl who looks about ten years old back on the ground. There’s a large blue van at the bottom, and another man and woman, and a body on the ground, covered by a rough grey blanket. Desi wrinkles her nose at the smell of blood. 

“Get back from the edge,” Mac says suddenly. “Everyone get back.” No one argues, he sounds both serious and scared. As Desi watches, a few chunks of rock crumble from the edges of the hole and tumble down inside, and the people trapped there cover their heads and duck. The man with the daughter bends over her, shielding her from the spattering chips of rock and dirt.

“This area is full of sinkholes like this,” Mac says. “The ground becomes hollowed out by flash floods and is extremely unstable, but it won’t fall until something puts pressure on it. Like that van.” 

“Okay, so if the ground is unsafe, how are we going to help them?” Jack asks. “I was gonna suggest throwing a rope over the side for them to climb, we still have that one in the car from earlier, but that’s just going to make this worse, right?”

“Yeah…” Mac is doing that thing where he spins around in place. Desi knows that look. It means he’s starting to make a plan. She’s noticed that Jack normally keeps talking while Mac is thinking, and Mac doesn’t seem to mind. She wonders if the same will apply if she starts interjecting some random knowledge.

“When I was Search and Rescue we airlifted someone out of one of these.” She glances around. “The chopper could fly straight up, so we never put any stress on the sides of the hole.”

“That’s it.” Mac looks at the truck. “That’s how we’re going to do it.”

“You’re going to make a helicopter out of that truck?” Jack asks.

“Not exactly. I am going to make a crane. Desi, I need the rope. Jack, help me.”

Desi runs off to their vehicle, and while she’s there parks it off the road in the shadow of some trees. This looks like it might take a while and she doesn’t want their arms dealer friends showing up and getting their prisoners back. 

By the time she gets back to the accident site, Mac and Jack have the truck’s rear rack in pieces on the ground, and Mac is putting it back together in a sort of vague resemblance of a construction crane’s top piece. 

Watching Mac work and Jack respond to half-vocalized directions like he’d been handed a detailed set of instructions is fascinating. Desi still feels like working with Mac is comparable to putting together an Ikea dresser. The instructions make sense to the person who made them, but if you don’t speak the same language, then you learn by trial and error and what looks like it should work. Desi knows enough about electrical engineering and vehicles to get by when that’s what Mac is working with, but he does chemistry and physics in his head that goes far over hers. She knows for a fact Jack was nowhere near a science nerd when she knew him. But it looks like spending a few years around Mac rubbed off a lot. Either Jack has learned a  _ lot _ of various science disciplines, or he’s just learned to decipher Mac-speak. Maybe both. She doesn’t think Duolingo has a course for that one. 

Desi speaks fourteen languages with some degree of fluency. She’s sure eventually she’ll pick up Mac’s. She steps up beside them. “Got the rope. Where do you want it?”

* * *

MAC’S HOUSE

UNOFFICIALLY THE PHOENIX TEAM’S CAR REPAIR SHOP

_ Mac, you promised this would be done by the weekend. _

Bozer isn’t really mad. But the fact that his car’s engine is still in pieces in Mac’s garage is a little aggravating nonetheless. He knows it’s not Mac’s fault his recovery time got cut short for a sensitive mission to act on some information that pea seed guy finally gave them, but it kind of interfered with his  _ previous _ mission; fixing the coughing sound Bozer’s car engine makes whenever it gets above thirty miles an hour.  _ Not like I do that much in L.A. traffic but I was going to drive down to San Diego and see Deja this weekend. _

There’s a little sticky note on the speedometer inside the car. 

**Sorry I didn’t get this done before Matty called us in. You can borrow my jeep, keys are hanging on the mug rack behind the Starbucks mug from Budapest.**

Bozer grins. Whenever possible, he insists they stop on missions at the local Starbucks and buy those souvenir mugs. They don’t always have the chance, but the collection is growing. He tries not to think about the times he dragged Leanna along even though she insisted it was a ridiculous thing to do. _ We were going to have all those mugs from all the places we’d been together.  _ He gave them all to Mac when she went off on her undercover. 

Budapest is a good memory at least. That’s the one where Jack and Riley told increasingly exaggerated stories of their CIA mission there, insisting both of them ‘remember Budapest differently’. 

He grabs the keys and walks out to Mac’s vehicle. The burgundy jeep has been Mac’s for a little over a year now, and not surprisingly it’s already needed repair several times. Bozer grimaces at the memory of having it towed to a shop to repair the busted windshield and damaged hood after it took some damage from the explosion that also took Mac’s memory.  _ We didn’t even know if we’d get him back then, but Jack insisted on having the car fixed. An act of faith, he called it. _

Bozer climbs in and presses down the brake to start the engine. There’s a disturbing whirring sound, and he freezes.  _ Been around Mac long enough to know that is not good. _ He slowly pulls his phone out of his pocket and holds it down with the camera turned on. When he sees what’s under the brake, his heart jumps into his throat. 

_ Oh hell no. _

* * *

THIS IS NOT HOW JACK EXPECTED TO SPEND HIS WEEKEND

Jack watches Mac put the finishing touches on his little winch assembly. It doesn’t look particularly sturdy, but Jack has full confidence that Mac’s mental physics calculations are sound.  _ Still _ …

“Let me go down,” Jack insists. “I know how to field-treat wounds, and if something happens I can deal with it.” 

“It should be me,” Mac insists. As usual.

“Trust me, kiddo, I’ll be fine. You say this thing is safe, it’s safe.” Jack points to the makeshift seatbelt harness hanging from Mac’s hand. “You sure have used those for everything but their intended purpose today.” 

It earns him a weak chuckle at least. Mac hands over the harness and Jack steps into it. “Hm. Little snug, but I don’t think it’s gonna squash anything I’d rather it didn’t, if you know what I mean.” Mac rolls his eyes. “Okay, how do you fasten this thing?” Mac’s fingers make quick work of the buckles and then the attachment to the rope hanging from the back of the truck. 

“Okay, ready when you are,” Jack calls to Desi, who’s sitting in the driver’s seat with the door open, leaning out to look back. 

“We have to balance the weight,” Desi says. “Mac, get in here with me.” 

“You saying I’m heavy?” Jack asks with a chuckle. 

“Heavier than me.” Desi gives him the thumbs up, and Jack steps over the side of the hole. It feels strange hanging in the empty air with nothing but some seatbelts and a rope wound around a truck tire to keep him from falling, but he’s used to Mac’s crazy plans by now. This is far from the weirdest.

“Okay, Des, give me some slack.” There’s a sharp jerk as the tire begins moving and the rope unspools, but it settles into a steady motion as Desi adjusts the pressure on the gas. Jack watches the sides of the sinkhole slowly move past. 

Suddenly, there’s another sharp jolt, and Jack can’t help a startled gasp as he falls maybe a foot and a half and the harness tightens uncomfortably when he stops. 

“Whoa. Maybe I should lay off the bagels.” 

“You okay?” Mac shouts.

“Yeah, rope just must have hung up and then slipped. Got a little shook up but I’ll be fine. Keep ‘er coming, Desi.” 

“Wait.” Mac shouts. “I need someone else to get in here so I can get out.” There’s a momentary scuffing sound, probably the farmer or his wife taking Mac’s place, and then Mac runs around to the tire and glances down. “Damn it, I was afraid of that. The rope slipped off the tire, it doesn’t have any guide to keep it in the center. It’s around the axle now.”

“Can you fix that?” Jack asks. 

“Yeah, once there’s no more tension on it. How far are you from the ground?”

“Uh…two feet, maybe?”

“Can you release the harness and just drop?”

“Yeah, bud, I can do that.” Jack fumbles the straps loose and then hauls himself up enough on the rope to pull his legs out of the straps.  _ Damn, I need to work on my arm strength.  _ He hasn’t done rope climbs in a while. 

He drops to the ground, knees protesting slightly.  _ Okay maybe I should have sent Mac down. Or Desi.  _ But it’s too late to rethink his life decisions. He steps over to the body covered by the blanket. It’s a man with dark curly hair half-hiding a pale face. He wonders if this was the driver, if maybe he’s looking at internal injuries and shock. He pulls the blanket back and then flinches. Jack knows a gunshot wound the minute he sees it. He also recognizes the uniform. 

“This is a border guard,” Jack says. “What happened?”

One of the men speaks up hesitantly. “We are refugees. We hired men to take us across the borders to safety in Austria. But we were stopped, and they shot this man to get past. We refused to go any further. We fought back, we overpowered them and took the van. I drove back here, trying to get to a small clinic that had been marked as a safe place on a map we were given in the camp. But then this happened, in the dark.” 

Jack takes in the whole story without so much as an interjected mutter.  _ Damn. _ He knows the business of smuggling desperate people for a profit is nasty. He’s sure those crooks have all the money these people had in the world. And God only knows what they would have done once they got to their destination. He glances at the little girl and shudders.  _ I hate this whole situation.  _ People who are desperate for better lives can get dragged into the most nightmarish ones. 

“Where’s his gun?” Jack asks suddenly, as he continues to inspect the wound. Out of the corner of his eye Jack sees Desi’s hand go to her own gun tucked in the small of her back. 

The first man holds it out slowly, the grip toward Jack. “He was confused, some time ago. We took it so he would not pull it out and shoot us by mistake.” 

Jack nods. He’s had to do similar things before.  _ Damn, there was that time Sid Lanier took a crack on the skull in Lagos and went totally off the wall. I never took so many guns and knives off one man in my life. _ Now he doesn’t poke fun at those scenes in movies where people just…keep dropping an insane amount of weapons. 

“Okay, well, I’m guessing he was shot through the side of this van.” Jack says, pointing to a hole in the side.

“Yes. The driver kept his gun in his lap.”

“Okay, well, the wound itself is a through and through, but I can see a piece of metal trapped in there.” Jack pulls some medical supplies out of his tac kit and gets to work. Quick-clot and bandages will have to be good enough for now. Jack’s seen worse injuries, hell, he’s  _ had _ worse injuries but from the sounds of it this is several hours old. 

“This quick-clot should slow the bleeding, but he needs a hospital.” 

Desi frowns. “All the hospitals in the area are gonna be a problem. Those smugglers probably want to tie up loose ends. A border guard with a gunshot wound is definitely going to draw them in. And most likely they have connections.”

Jack nods. “What were you saying about a clinic?”

One of the men holds out a stained, creased diagram that’s been crudely hand-drawn over a tourist guide’s brochure map. “It shows good and bad places to stop along the way, best places to cross the border.” He points out a clinic drawn in red with a little medical cross on it. “The owner will not turn us in to authorities if we go there.”

“And that should keep us off the smugglers’ radar too,” Desi says. “People like that tend to have paid off law enforcement on their take; it’s how they get through checkpoints and find out if they’re suspected. Keeping a low profile should keep us safe long enough to get this guard the help he needs.” 

“Okay, get ready to take these people up!” Jack calls. “Mac, is that rope on the tire fixed?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, the little girl’s coming up first. What’s your name, kiddo?” Jack asks, reaching for her gently.

“Yasmin,” She says quietly.

“Okay, Yasmin, I’m Jack, and my friends up there are Mac and Desi, and they are gonna take really good care of you okay?” Jack says. “I’m gonna send you up to them okay?”

The harness is loose on her, but Jack tightens the waist strap as much as he can and tells her to hold on tight to the rope. “One ready to come up!” He calls. He hears the truck start, and when their precious cargo gets to the top, he sees gloved hands grab the rope, pull it in, and set the girl safely on solid ground.

Jack turns back to the others. The two men have stepped back, and the woman is walking up to him. 

The woman’s hands are held protectively around her stomach. Jack turns back to the belt harness.  _ You have to wear a seatbelt more carefully when you’re pregnant, stands to reason same holds true here. _ He glances over the knots Mac’s used and adjusts the whole harness slightly. It’s taking more time, but he can’t risk hurting the woman or her child. He straps her in and repeats the process he did with Yasmin. 

It takes longer for Mac to talk him through making a stretcher with pieces of the van to bring the injured guard up, but Jack is pretty proud of himself for doing the build without Mac there to show him the right pieces. He’s learned a lot from the kid. 

When he finally steps into the harness and is hoisted back out of the hole, the first thing he sees is Mac’s worried face as he steps over to pull Jack out. “Kiddo, something wrong?”

Mac leans in a little closer. “That guard needs surgery fast if we’re going to save his life. And from the looks of things that clinic is not equipped for it.”

“Well, you can handle that, right?” Jack asks. “I mean, I watched you cut Wreck-It Ralph’s chest open in the back of an SUV with your pocketknife.”

“Uh…” Mac holds out his hands. The gloves on them are absolutely shredded around the palms, and Jack thinks he sees some burgundy stains before Mac quickly closes his hands again.

“What’s that from, Mac?”

“Had to make sure the rope didn’t slip.” 

Jack glances from the rope to the tire to Mac. “You didn’t make a guard for it? I thought you were gonna build something to keep it from slipping.”

“Couldn’t risk damaging the axle, we still need to drive out of here. There were some gloves in the truck, I wore those to guide the rope.” 

“Mac, let me see your hands.” Jack says. Mac slowly uncurls them. The palms are reddened and raw in spots. “Oh kiddo.” Mac definitely isn’t doing surgery with these. _He_ needs a doctor. But they can’t just give up.

“We’ll figure it out when we get there. Improvise, right?” Jack says. Mac nods. Jack turns to the farmer and his wife. “Can we borrow your truck?”

“Of course. We can walk from here,” the woman says. Jack takes another one of his ‘call Phoenix for damages’ papers. 

“Can’t guarantee my boy Mac here will return your truck in one piece, so just get in touch with these people and they’ll make sure to get you a new vehicle.” Jack says. “You got someone around who has a phone, or who can get you into town without a truck?”

The woman nods. “The neighbors will. We help each other here.”

_ Sounds like home. _ Jack knows the neighbors back at the ranch will drop everything to help someone out. He’s done the same for them before. It’s a good way to live; he’s always preferred it to looking out for only yourself.  _ Probably why I ended up in a job like this. _

“Okay, if you’re ready, let’s load up and get outta here,” Desi says. Jack helps put the guard, who apparently told the others that his name was Felix before he got too delirious from blood loss to be coherent, into the bed of the truck. 

Mac climbs into the back next to Jack, grimacing when he has to rest his hands on the edge of the pickup bed to jump inside. Jack sighs.  _ Well, this is gonna get interesting.  _

* * *

RILEY’S APARTMENT

IT FEELS REALLY EMPTY WITHOUT ABINA

Riley rolls over and glances at the sun streaks on the floor. It’s late morning, but she still doesn’t feel like getting out of bed. She ran a forty-eight-hour non-stop mission for the past couple days, and Matty insisted she take today off and have a long weekend. 

She won’t admit even to herself how much she misses waking up to the sounds of other people. Abina’s spring break was all too short. 

She’s considering, once her lease is up, moving in with Mac and Jack.  _ Abina’s talking about going in with some of her classmates for a place closer to school, and I can’t say I blame her. She’s really happy there.  _ She’s been talking nonstop about a group of programming students she found on campus; they’re very into the same kinds of things she is, and they’re even planning to start up their own summer coding camp for inner city kids through an outreach liason at the college.  _ She found her place in the world and I’m happy for her. _

Riley has more reasons than just rattling around an empty apartment all summer to consider moving. Billy’s starting to seriously talk committing. Nothing is finalized yet, but she can tell he’s moving that way.  _ Depending on how this goes, we might need to get a different place. My apartment is pretty small for a couple. _ It held her and Sam fine, and Abina as well, but the master bedroom can’t fit more than a twin comfortably, and neither Sam nor Abina came with a lot of their own things. 

Staying with Mac and Jack would mean she’d be ready to apartment (or house, Billy’s conversations have led her to think he’s a house kind of guy)-hunt without having to deal with the hassles of already having a place with a three-year lease on it. She’d move in with Mom, but Diane is planning to move out when she and Jack get married, which is set for this June.  _ They’re definitely not waiting around for a lot of wedding planning, but I guess they want to make up for lost time. _ At least they didn’t have to book a venue or catering, it’s going to be a small just-for-family event, and they plan on having it in the barn at the ranch. Jack talked to a friend of his that has a big pork smoker, and he’s going to have him provide the main dish. Riley can only imagine that the rest of the family will be showing up with their specialties.  _ It’s the kind of wedding only a Dalton could pull off, and Mom seems so happy. _ She knows why. It’s going to be full of a big happy family. She and Elwood had eloped.  _ She never got a real wedding, and Jack’s going to give her the best one he can possibly think of. _

Riley’s phone buzzes and she rolls over, sighing.  _ Speak of the devil, that’s probably Billy. _ He’d said if a job didn’t come up he might fly in this weekend to see her.

It’s not Billy. It’s Bozer. And it’s a picture. She squints and rubs sleep out of her eyes.  _ What is that? Did Mac make something weird before he went off to… _ That’s a lot of wires. And it looks a little too dangerous to be a Mac build. 

Riley is instantly wide awake. She jumps out of bed, throwing on a sweatshirt over her tank top and shoving her feet into tennis shoes. 

**Call Matty. On my way.** She has the team’s phones permanently in her tracker network, and when she pulls up the app it looks like Bozer is at Mac’s house.  _ Not again. _ The last time there was a bomb in that house, Mac and Jack were there.  _ People really need to stop. _

**It’s in the car. Don’t think I can take my foot off the brake now.**

Riley can only imagine how shook up Bozer must be. There’s none of his trademark abbreviations, emoticons, or weird emoji faces. Just straightforward messages. He didn’t even send an explanation with the picture, probably too stunned to type anything rational.

She knows why he sent this though. If someone’s targeted one member of their team, everyone might be in danger. She checks her own car thoroughly for any triggers before getting in, even going so far as to crawl underneath and look for clean new wiring. She doesn’t see anything that raises her suspicions, but she also feels keenly aware of everything she does on her drive. She doesn’t use her turn signal, which earns her more than a few angry horn blares, but she just can’t shake the thought that she’ll feel safe that the car didn’t blow when she pushed the brake or turned the key, but then she’ll hit that lever and go up in a fiery inferno. 

By the time she reaches Mac’s house, she can see a Phoenix team’s van in the driveway. One of their bomb techs is just standing up from beside the car and putting away his long-handled mirror.

“What’s going on?” Riley asks.

“Well, we’ve established that the bomb Bozer activated with his foot is a simple pressure switch,” Matty says. “Unfortunately, the team just informed me that there’s a secondary device rigged to the first. If we disarm that one, we blow the second one.”

“This sounds like…”

“The Ghost. Our team is fairly certain this is his work, targeting Mac again, but he’s covered his tracks well. He didn’t leave anything that’s streaming video to his location.”

Riley sighs.  _ First James playing games, then Murdoc up to no good, now the Ghost. _ Mac just can’t catch a break.

“Where is Mac?”

“He and Jack and Desi missed exfil, and we’ve tried contacting them without success. Bozer has been asking for Mac too. We…haven’t told him how the situation stands. He doesn’t need more worries.”

Riley nods.  _ Mac and Jack missing somewhere overseas, Bozer sitting on a bomb meant for his best friend. Today sucks. _

“Can I have a suit?” She asks, nodding toward the bomb techs who are taking theirs off. “I want to go talk to him.” 

“Of course.” Matty says. She motions one of the techs over, and Riley sheds her sweatshirt and suits up. This isn’t the first time she’s worn a blast suit, but she feels too hot and her hands shake when she settles the helmet over her head. She feels slow and clumsy as she walks up to the car. Inside, Bozer is sitting, looking at her but not really seeing. She can tell that thousand-yard stare all too well. 

“Bozer?” She asks. 

He blinks at her, and a little more awareness flashes into his eyes. “Riley, where’s Mac?”

“Still in Romania.” Actually she has no idea where he is, but she doesn’t say that.  _ Hopefully they didn’t get captured by those arms smugglers.  _ “He’ll be here as soon as he can, I know he will.”

“Did you tell him?” Bozer asks.

This time Riley decides honesty is best. “No, we haven’t been able to get in touch.”

“Don’t tell him,” Bozer says. Riley raises her eyebrows. “He can’t do anything from over there, and he’s just going to worry and you know how he gets when he’s worried and he’s gonna mess something up and get caught or killed and I can’t let him die too.”

“Bozer,  _ no one _ is dying. We’re gonna figure this thing out.” Riley sighs. She wonders if it’s safe to tell him this is the Ghost.  _ I’ve lied to him once already. Can’t do it again. _ “Techs think this is the Ghost targeting Mac again.” 

“If this is the Ghost, where’s the camera?” Bozer asks. 

“They can’t find it.” Riley sighs. “They haven’t detected any signal coming from the bomb. I think the Ghost is so determined to get Mac that he hasn’t stuck to his pattern.”

Bozer shakes his head. “No, it’s like a compulsion. He always has a camera and he always plants three bombs. I think it’s just something he  _ has _ to do.” 

“And two are connected to each other, one isn’t.” Riley spins around. “There’s another bomb somewhere!” 

“Get me LAPD bomb squad right now!” Matty shouts. 

“They’re gonna start looking,” Riley says. Bozer nods slightly, looking relieved. “I’m gonna come back as soon as I can but I need to go help them see if we can find the Ghost’s other target, okay?”

Bozer nods. 

Riley takes off her bomb suit and pulls out her rig.  _ Time to get to work. _ She needs to start thinking and get one step ahead of the Ghost.  _ Bozer is literally sitting on his bomb and he had the best idea of all of us, to keep looking for the Ghost’s pattern. Because he doesn’t break it.  _

“If he’s after Mac, how else would he target him?” Matty asks. 

“Maybe it’s not about Mac.” Riley frowns. “Sometimes the Ghost uses his devices to force responses or move people where he wants them, right? What if he already blew one that gave him a distraction or something else he needed in order to get here?”

Matty barks another order at the bomb tech who is likely on the phone with LAPD. “I need every report of an explosion in the last thirty-six hours.”

“Don’t bother, Matty, I’m already in the database.” Being able to plug into LAPD’s systems at any time has been very helpful. She sorts through the information, then pulls up a list of incidents that fit her criteria. Most of them follow a predictable pattern, but one stands out. Riley turns her screen so Matty can see it. 

“Okay, most of this appears to be cartel violence related, but…here’s something strange. A bomb threat was called in to the Los Angeles Transit Authority early this morning. The building was cleared and bomb techs were dispatched to the scene, but the only thing they found was a backpack thrown against a wall that contained nothing more than some wadded up cloth and a kitchen timer clipped to the zipper. They concluded it was a prank call but were unable to trace the number.” Riley looks up. “The third bomb wasn’t a bomb. It was a diversion.” 

“He used the chaos to break into the traffic control network? Why?” Matty asks. “Is Bozer just the distraction and he’s about to do something citywide? Tie police and bomb squads up in traffic accidents so he can work undisturbed?”

“Actually I think it’s something petty. I think I found our camera.” Riley says. “He’s wired into the street cams. He hacked the traffic control center from inside while they were dealing with the bomb threat. Maybe I can hack him back. But it looks like he did it directly from their servers, so I have to be inside their building and clipped directly into the network to do it.”

“Okay, we’ll get you there.” Matty says.

“He has the street cams, Matty, he can see us leaving here and heading to that building. If he knows we know, then he’ll just run.”

“Not going to be a problem. Just get to Phoenix.” Riley knows better than to argue. She packs up her rig, gets in her car, and drives.

When she reaches Phoenix, she texts Matty, and almost instantly her phone rings. 

“Matty?”

“Transport’s waiting on the roof.” There’s a small note of triumph in Matty’s voice. “You can’t go through the city, but you can go over it.” 

_ The chopper. She’s going to fly me there. _ Riley takes the stairs two at a time to the roof, where the helicopter is waiting, warmed up and ready to take off. It’s a little strange to see Cynthia in the pilot’s seat instead of Jack, but Riley just waves, grabs a headset, and climbs in beside the woman.

It’s a short flight to their destination, thankfully, and apparently Matty’s already gotten in touch with the right people, because when the chopper touches down, Riley is welcomed and directed straight to the server room. 

A tech probably about her own age shows her where the servers that control the video feeds are, and she sorts through the stacks until she finds the ones that capture Mac’s neighborhood. There’s an intersection not far from his house and one of the camera angles catches his front driveway. She focuses on that video stream, and it’s only a matter of time before she manages to find the parasitic algorithm that’s piggybacking off the official monitoring system.  _ Got you. _

The Ghost may be a good bomb maker, but he’s definitely no hacker. Clearly he hired someone to build this algorithm and then just plugged it into the right spot. Whoever he hired is decent, but Riley was building better code in tenth grade.  _ Okay, time to turn the tables. _

Hacking in is fairly straightforward. Riley knows the Ghost won’t see her doing it, he’s not tech-savvy enough to see the signs of her incursion, and he won’t be able to kick her out even if he somehow did.  _ It’s weird to be going up against someone who isn’t a big challenge. _ Riley is used to having to work carefully to stay under the radar of someone with her skill set.  _ At least this is going quickly. _ For Bozer’s sake. 

Matty calls while she’s still working.

“Riley, not to rush you, but how are things?”

“The signal is streaming to a location here in L.A. If I can pinpoint that, maybe we stand a chance of figuring this out and finding the Ghost.” Riley says. “I think I’m close. Tell Bozer how things are going.”

“He’s hanging in there really well, all things considered,” Matty says. 

“Hopefully he won’t have to wait much longer.” Riley’s computer pings. “I got a location. I’m not as close as Phoenix tac teams would be, so I’m sending you coordinates for a strike.”

“And the vehicles on the streets?”

Riley grins. “I put the Ghost’s feed of the cams on the route on a perpetual alternating loop. He probably won’t be paying enough attention to notice the same blue Jetta running a red a few times. Also I hope whoever that is gets a ticket. I’ll mention it on the way out.” 

* * *

CLINIC

FOR ONCE THEY ARE NOT HERE ONLY FOR MAC

By the time they get to the clinic, Jack has been introduced to Nazir, Yasmin’s father, and Bilal, the brother of the pregnant woman, Sana. She’s riding up front with Yasmin and Desi, since the roads are pretty bad and the cam of the truck provides a little more protection. 

He’s also found out that the ringleader of the smugglers is known as Harun. They can’t be sure that’s a real name or just an alias, but Jack makes mental note of it to put the guy on a watchlist.  _ I don’t like the thought of him preying on people like this. _ He knows some smugglers are what they claim to be, that they just transport people across borders and then drop them off to start new lives, but anyone who shoots a border guard probably doesn’t have the best interest of human lives. Jack’s pretty sure that if the refugees hadn’t fought back, they’d probably have disappeared into forced labor and prostitution. 

When Desi parks at the clinic, Jack gets out and walks up to the door, but when he tries it, it’s locked. He shrugs, knocking. In a few moments the door is opened by a middle-aged woman in a white lab coat.

“Can I help you?” She asks in Romanian.

“Do you speak English?” Jack asks. It’s probably the only one that everyone here can understand. 

“Yes, well enough. What has happened?”

“My friends and I need help, a man has been injured and he will not survive if he doesn’t get surgery.” Jack decides it’s best to state the obvious and leave off most of the details. Nazir’s map says this clinic is safe, but it was also given to him by someone who said Harun was trustworthy. Jack can’t help but feel set on edge. 

“Surgery?” The woman asks, her eyes widening. 

“Yes. He was shot and the bullet carried debris into the wound. We have to remove it and stop the bleeding.” 

“This is a pediatric clinic. I treat sniffles, and scrapes and maybe broken bones. Not gunshot wounds.”

“I just need your supplies,” Mac says, stepping up beside Jack. 

“Are  _ you _ a doctor?”

“Not even a little bit.” Mac says. “But Jack and Desi and I all have field medical training.”

“Who are you people?” The doctor asks.

“Trust me, you are better off not knowing.” Jack says. “Please, he’s going to die if you don’t help us.”

“Bring him in.” The woman pushes the doors open. “I’m Dr. Terzic.” 

“Like he said, I’m Jack, he’s Mac, the woman driving is Desi, and this is Sana, Yasmin, Nazir, and Bilal.” Jack says as the men walk in with the stretcher. 

“Come, sit down, you look exhausted,” Dr. Terzic says. “I have water bottles and some electrolyte drinks.” She runs off and returns with an armful of small bottles. “They are made for children but I’m sure they would be better than nothing.” She hands out the bottles to the group of refugees and then kneels beside Felix. “I have not seen anything like this since medical school. Anyone with a gunshot wound I never treat here. I send hunting accidents and other wounds to the city hospital.”

“At the moment, the hospital’s not going to be a safe place for him,” Jack says. “And besides he doesn’t have the time.” Felix’s face looks grey. He’s gotten a lot worse on the drive over. “As long as you have the basic tools and an area we can clean and turn into a passable surgery suite, my friends and I can do the rest.” He’s taken care of just as nasty wounds in a vet clinic.

“I will see what I can find.” The doctor hurries away, returning with a handful of tools. “I’m sorry, this is all I have.”

“We can make that work.” Jack’s become an optimist about improvisation. 

“How are we gonna find a surgery manual?” Mac asks. “We can’t just go digging around and hope for the best, and this isn’t one of the procedures I memorized.”  _ Ok…that’s just slightly disconcerting… _

“No need.” Jack taps his head. “See, while there may not be a whole lot of nerd stuff up in here, that’s because all that space is taken up by my memorized versions of Grandpappy and Pops’s old military manuals. We got Korean War era weapons, tanks sorted by country and war, and…emergency field surgery. At your disposal.”

“Okay, well, Mr. Miltary Encyclopedia, what do we need?” Desi asks.

Jack glances over the tools laid out on the table.  _ Okay, so as a kid I was a nerd about things that can kill you. But I was also really invested in things that can save your life. _ Sure, he had the ornithology phase, but other than that he’d always seen the military or law enforcement as his career path, and studied accordingly. 

He picks up several instruments and sets them aside. “Okay, the only thing I’m missing is a clamp thing like this, but curved.” He holds up the item in question for Mac to see. “Can’t remember what it’s called but I could probably do a technical drawing.” He’s always been more of a visual learner. 

“Okay, we can work with this,” Mac says. “Jack, you get started drawing that. Everyone else, I’m gonna need your help. We have to build a forge.”

“Oohh nice.” Jack spent some time learning how to shoe horses the old-fashioned way from the local farrier one summer. He’s got fond memories of the time he spent sweating in that little outbuilding. “I’ll bring out this sketch as soon as I’m done.”

Drawing takes considerably less time than forge-building. Jack helps Mac put together the makeshift materials he needs. Mac seems pretty excited about this part, he always is when fire is somehow involved. Jack’s never seen anyone who loves it this much, but he’s not complaining.  _ It’s no wonder they called him the Phoenix when he was a vigilante. _

The thought sends a stuttering pang through his chest and makes him glance at Desi.  _ There’s no way she doesn’t know something about his past. _ They can redact the kid’s file until it’s nothing but black ink, but they can’t erase newspaper articles, or blogs, or anything else that has a record of Mac’s past. And Desi is nothing if not a good agent.  _ She has to have been digging. I can’t imagine her not. _ Jack wishes they could tell her and get everything out in the open, but the only one who gets to decide that is Mac.  _ He’s had enough people find out about his past the wrong way. I’d rather not take that choice away from him this time. _ It’s the least Mac deserves. 

He pulls his attention back to where Mac is stoking the fire, getting the forge hot enough to melt the metal. 

“You’d be a hit at the Renaissance festival or Mackinac Island,” Desi is saying. “That’s the only other place I’ve ever seen someone  _ actually _ use a forge.” 

Jack shakes his head.  _ She talks about Michigan almost as much as I talk about Texas. _ He’s never seen anyone else with as much state pride. He could tell from the first week he met her that the place she was raised runs in her blood, just like it does for him. He knows everyone else has their quirks, like Riley’s refusal to carry an umbrella, or Mac’s casual mentions of the tiny little Northern California towns he grew up near, but Desi is the only one who seems so defined by her state.  _ Maybe because she has happy memories of her time there. Because it was good experiences, not bad ones. _ Jack knows Mac and Riley and Bozer don’t have the best memories of their own childhoods. Matty doesn’t really talk about hers at all.  _ I wonder if that’s what the connection is. _

“Okay, time to turn this,” Mac holds up the straight clamp in his hand, “into that.” He taps it against the paper Jack drew the tool they need on.

“Out of all of us, I’m the one with the most experience handling hot metal,” Jack says. “I’ll take it from here.” Mac doesn’t need to add real burns to his rope burns. 

It’s been a long time since Jack’s pounded horseshoes, but the feeling isn’t something he’s likely to forget. It comes almost naturally, and he feels fourteen again, being shown the proper way to position the metal and swing the hammer, shaping the shoe until it’s a perfect fit for the horse. He’s very, very good at shaping curves. 

When he’s finished, and cooled and tempered the metal the best he can with the supplies they had on hand, he holds it up. “What do you think?”

“Okay, someday I am dragging the both of you to the Renaissance festival.” Desi says. “I hear some rumor that both of you can rock a kilt?”

Jack groans, Mac rests his face in his hand.  _ Oh we are never ever going to live that down.  _

“Okay, let’s go save this guy,” Jack says, gathering up what he needs. Sana and Bilal meet them at the door of the room they’ve prepped for a surgery suite, they’ve been scrubbing and sanitizing everything the best they can. Dr. Terzic takes three clean pairs of nurses’ scrubs out of a closet and sets them on a cart next to the bathroom. Mac, Jack and Desi all wash their hands and change into the clean scrubs. It’s not till they’re inside the surgery room that Mac asks the question Jack knew he was going to. They had this conversation in the back of the truck.  _ I really need to start carrying a backup pair of glasses. _ Jack’s not sure he’s ready to face Matty’s reaction to that, but it would have come in useful today. 

“Desi, how steady are your hands?” Mac asks. 

She stares at him. “You are not seriously asking me to do this.” 

“I can’t guarantee my hands are capable of that right now, and Jack’s not willing to trust his eyesight.” Mac says, nodding down to the man on the table. “His life depends on someone with  _ very  _ careful hands doing this job.” 

“I can sit in a sniper nest in below freezing weather for eight hours and still pull off a first-time kill shot.”

Mac frowns.

“That means she’s good, kiddo,” Jack says.  _ She can control anything affecting her grip and shot, even shivering.  _ He’s seen Desi shoot, she becomes almost mechanical when she does. It’s like her world narrows to her sighting eye and her trigger finger. “She can do it.” Desi can kill without a single tremor. He knows she can save a life too. “I can talk you through it all, and Mac and I will be extra hands. Just can’t afford to make a mistake here.” Desi nods and picks up the first of the instruments Jack points out. 

“I feel like I’m literally playing  _ Operation. _ ” Desi says. “I do not ever want to see that game again after this, okay?”

“Oh me either,” Jack says. “Not after standing on the Ghost’s bomb with that weird detonator pin we had to pull out.” He glances at Mac. The kid’s kind of freaking out, and Jack wants to make sure he settles down before he has a panic attack and they have another thing to worry about. “Mac made some kinda thing out of a shopping cart that pulled it.”

“Weird kinda thing?” Mac says. “That was a pulley-based bolt removal rig.”

Jack grins, he’s successfully made Mac correct him, that’s a step in the right direction. He turns back to Desi. “Okay, let’s do this.” 

Talking her through the surgery goes pretty well. Like any Farm trainee, Desi knows rudimentary medical terms and procedures, and Jack doesn’t have to clarify too much in order for her to be able to work. Her hands are incredibly steady, watching her feels like watching Mac.  _ She could have had a career as a neurosurgeon if that’s what she’d wanted. _ But he knows Desi feels most alive here, in the field. That doing the same kind of thing every day would slowly kill her. 

She carefully stops bleeding and uses a tool Mac magnetized to pull out some smaller fragments of metal in the wound, ones that are harder to reach than the visible shard. Finally, Desi drops a small piece of metal onto the table and tilts her head back, rolling her shoulders. 

“I got everything out. Now I just need to close the wound and hope for the best.” Desi sighs. “He’s lost a lot of blood, and this clinic doesn’t have a supply for a transfusion.”

“I’m a universal donor,” Jack says. “Mac, could you rig up the right equipment to give him a transfusion?”

“Yeah, I think I can do that.” Mac scurries off to find things, and Jack turns to Desi. 

“Sorry we had to put you on the spot like that.”

“It’s fine.” Desi says. She sets down the clamp, then looks down at her hands. “I was the logical choice.”

“I saw your file. Cartaghena in ’15. I’m sorry.” 

Desi nods tightly. “Thank you.” She looks back at the guard on the table. “I think with the transfusion he’ll pull through.” She takes out the tools for putting in the rest of the stitches. “Thanks for trusting me.”

“You did everything you could have done, Dez. It’s not your fault.”

“He took that bullet for me. You know it is.” She sighs. “Had to learn to live with that a long time ago. He saved my life, so I guess there’s still something left to do with it. Like saving him.” Her fingers move quickly and easily through the motions of putting in the stitches. 

“You’re worth saving, you know that, right?” Jack feels like he’s talking to Mac.  _ Damn it why do I seem to magnetically attract people who see themselves as expendable? _

“After the things I’ve done? Jack, I have more blood on my hands than some of the people I’ve put in black sites. He had a family. He was a good man.” Desi glances at him for a moment. “I had to go tell them he wasn’t coming home because I did. I kind of hoped his wife would throw something at me. It would have made things easier.” 

Jack nods. “I know the feeling.” 

And then Mac comes back with what he needs, and Jack rolls up his sleeve.  _ Here goes nothing.  _

* * *

PHOENIX HOLDING ROOMS

THEY COULD REALLY USE SAM RIGHT NOW

Riley almost can’t believe it. Phoenix tac teams have the Ghost in custody. By the time she got back to Phoenix, the secure transport was on its way back as well.  _ They took him by surprise, he surrendered.  _ They’d taken a detonation switch off him, wired to enough explosives in his apartment to level the city block, but apparently he either hadn’t had time to use it, or he’d preferred to live. Riley hopes it’s the latter, because that means somewhere inside him there’s some shred of humanity. Something she can play on to find a way to save Bozer’s life. 

When she walks into the holding room, she tries to keep her face neutral. It’s not the terrible facial scarring that makes her want to shudder. It’s the empty eyes. It almost reminds her of how Jack described confronting Mac in James’s warehouse when Mac had amnesia.  _ Like there wasn’t really a person behind that face. Just some kind of crazy mission.  _

Still, she’s here trying to reason with a man who might be able to save Bozer. She puts her game face on and sits down.  _ You can do this. _

“Alfred Pena? I’m Riley Davis.” She wants him to trust her, and an exchange of names is a good start.

She half expects a Winter Soldier style ‘Who the hell is Pena’ out of the man, but he just nods slightly. She’s not sure if it’s better or worse that he knows who he was. Or at least some of who he was. 

“Do you know why you’re here?” She asks.

“Because you’ve been chasing me for years. Finally caught up. I suppose I’m getting too old for this.” It’s a sickeningly normal speech pattern, it reminds her of what it would be like to face down a rogue Jack.  _ I guess dealing with Murdoc has made me used to grandiose movie-style villains.  _ Pena might be a monster, but he’s a monster with a human persona. 

“You’re here because you planted a bomb in a car that belongs to an old friend of yours. An Angus MacGyver.” She pulls up the picture Bozer sent her. “The wrong person got in his car this morning. Mac’s friend Bozer. He’s not dead yet, and we need you to tell us how to stop that bomb.”

She’s hoping telling Pena he trapped the wrong person might make him more cooperative.  _ If he wanted Mac dead he wouldn’t help us, but he doesn’t have anything against Bozer, that we know of.  _

Pena just shrugs. “People are in the wrong place at the wrong time quite often when it comes to MacGyver. It seems to me like he only survives by sacrificing anyone around him.”  _ Something got twisted in how he sees that night the bomb went off at Carlos’s clinic.  _ Riley suddenly understands why the Ghost has targeted Mac.  _ He blames Mac for what happened that night. Somehow he rewrote a version of events where Mac was the one whose choice left Pena in there alone.  _ She’s heard Mac’s story, how Pena sent him out to keep watch, because Mac was literally falling asleep on his feet.  _ He blames himself enough for what happened. I’m glad he isn’t here to hear this. _

“Mac didn’t mean for that to happen,” Riley says sharply. She should keep her cool, but hearing someone else accuse Mac of letting other people take a fall for him is driving her insane.  _ Jack would have reached across the table and punched him by now. Probably a really good thing it’s me in here. _ “I don’t even know you, but I know Mac. And I know you made him the man he is. A good man.” She swallows thickly. “You know what he was like when Bozer’s brother died, you know how lost and angry he was. You saw what it drove him to, and you were there to make sure he didn’t fall over the edge.” 

_ Mac told me how close he was before he met Pena, to becoming the kind of vigilante everyone eventually thought he was. To becoming a heartless killer.  _ “Please, don’t put him through that again. Don’t be the reason he loses another brother.” 

She wonders if it’s a lost cause, appealing to any humanity left in this shell of a man. But she doesn’t have any other recourse.  _ Well, aside from the one that one of our techs suggested. Bringing him to the bomb site and making sure if Bozer dies so does he. _ But that’s too long a shot for Riley’s liking. They can’t actually be sure the Ghost cares enough about his own life to tell them the truth. She isn’t willing to gamble Bozer’s life on that. 

“He still feels terrible about what happened that night. He lived with your death on his conscience for years, and now he’s living with what you’ve done since. He already thinks he’s to blame. Don’t kill Bozer. Mac won’t survive that.” 

The words hang in the air, cold and honest.  _ If he thought one of us took his place, died in his stead, he’d never be able to handle it. _ Riley knows that’s Jack’s biggest fear.  _ He’s not afraid to die protecting Mac, but he’s afraid of what Mac would do in the aftermath. _

“It looks to me like he’s surviving just fine after me.” 

_ If you call becoming more and more reckless, getting caught and sent to prison for two years, and throwing himself in harms’ way in the field over and over because he can’t stomach another death on his conscience ‘just fine’. Sure.  _ But it’s clear she’ll get absolutely nowhere appealing to Pena’s old friendship with Mac. He wants Mac to suffer. Still, she has another card to play. 

“Listen to me. Alf. This isn’t who you were.” Riley pulls out her phone, scrolling until she finds a picture of Mac with Annabelle and holding it out. “This is your daughter. She’s a precious little girl and she adores Mac. She wants to be a hero like the father she remembers. Do not take that away from her!”

She knows she’s starting to cry. She doesn’t care. 

“Please. You have the chance today to do something Annabelle can be proud of. So she can think of her father as a hero.”

“Annabelle.” The voice is raspy, damaged by the same blast that turned half of Pena’s face into a scarred mask. But it sounds human. “That’s Annabelle.” He nods to the phone still resting on the table. “She looks so much like her mother.”

Riley nods. “But she has her father’s eyes. I can see that now.” She swallows. “I think she’ll want to see you.”

“No, she won’t. She doesn’t need to see this.” Pena says, head lowered. “Doesn’t need to remember me as a monster.”

“Help me now, and all she’s going to see is a hero. Just tell me how to disarm the bomb in Mac’s car.” 

“I can’t stop it now.” Pena sighs. “I made it to be failsafe.” For the first time, Riley sees deep pain in his eyes. “It was meant to kill MacGyver. There is no way even he could stop it now.” 

* * *

Mac crumples into a chair in the clinic waiting room. Jack’s chugging bottles of orange juice and Pedialyte after the blood transfusion, and Desi is dozing on a couch next to Sana, she was out like a light the second she sat down. Mac can understand being under that much stress, having someone’s life literally in her hands. Plus, she’s probably gotten two hours of sleep in the past two days. 

Nazir sits down beside him. “How is he?”

“It looks like he’ll live. He still needs a hospital, to make sure we didn’t miss anything that might get infected, but he should stabilize enough to be taken somewhere that will be safe.” He turns to the man with a tired smile. “It was a good thing you all did. Saving him. You put your own lives and freedom at a lot of risk.”

“If we did not care about him, then what would our lives be worth?” Nazir asks. “If we lose our humanity we might as well live in cages like animals.” 

Mac swallows and nods.  _ That’s why I never even tried to break out of prison. I thought I’d killed a man. I thought I deserved whatever happened.  _ He’s glad that it looks like these people won’t have to live with Felix’s death on their minds. 

Nazir picks up the folded paperclip Mac has set on the arm of his chair, a small bird.  _ I found a little jar of them on the reception desk, and I’m still trying to make my hands stop shaking. _ That whole surgery had been tense. His rope burns are cleaned and bandaged now, so his hands are a little clumsy with the wire, but it gives him something to focus on. 

Nazir smiles at the little sculpture, then turns it over and over in his fingers as he speaks. “I brought my family here because I wanted my daughter to understand that there were better things in the world, that there was more than senseless war and killing. I wanted a better life for Yasmin. She should not have to grow up afraid.”

Mac nods.  _ Spending your childhood looking over your shoulder is no way to live. _ He should know.  _ It wasn’t the same, but life with James was a different kind of war.  _ He’d never really felt safe either. 

“After her mother died, I was so afraid. I kept thinking, what will happen to Yasmin if I am next? I couldn’t live with the thought of my daughter growing up an orphan in that place. So we left.” Mac swallows.  _ And for all intents and purposes, James left me to that fate. _ He was lucky he had Harry and the Bozers, or he’d very likely have ended up in the foster system, probably labeled a problem child and bounced from one home to the next.  _ Nazir was willing to leave behind everything he knew and risk everything to try and make sure his daughter grows up with a father.  _ Mac wonders if it will ever get easier to watch a caring family. 

“She’s fortunate to have a father who cares so much.”

“So are you. Your father is a very good man.”

Mac startles.  _ He immediately saw Jack as my dad. _ Mac’s used to Jack introducing Mac as his son, but he doesn’t remember Jack doing that this time. But all the same, Nazir looked at the two of them and saw a parent and a child. 

It makes Mac’s chest feel warm in a strange way.  _ All this time, I’ve known we’re family. Because we chose to be. But even from the outside, it’s obvious now.  _ It doesn’t take Jack telling people Mac is his son to prove it. It just takes seeing them together. 

“Yeah, he is.” Mac swallows the tightness in his throat and blinks, this is not the time to get emotional and start crying. “He would risk anything to protect me. Just like you would for Yasmin.”

Nazir nods. 

Mac sits in silence for a while, but he can’t seem to relax enough to sleep, even though he feels exhausted. He gets up and starts pacing the room for lack of something better to do. He watches Desi shift and blink on the couch, and then sit up, glancing at Sana, who is staring at her hands in her lap.

“Are you alright?” Desi asks.

“I am so afraid.” Sana’s voice is only a whisper. “I want this child to grow up safe. But I am so afraid of failing them.” 

Desi reaches for Sana’s hand. “You are very brave. Believe me. You remind me of my mother.”

Mac knows he probably shouldn’t listen to this, but he can’t bring himself to move.

“She was six months pregnant with me when she and my father got on a boat and sailed away from their homeland. And it was the U.S. that opened its doors to us. It wasn’t easy for them. I don’t remember that time, and they don’t talk about it much, but whenever they did, my mother always said that what kept them going, what kept them alive, sometimes, was the thought that they were building a better life for their child.” She smiles. “That’s what you’re doing too.” 

Mac shifts slightly, and the rasp of his jacket against the wall draws Desi’s attention. She looks up, but she doesn’t look angry to have been overheard. She just pats Sana’s hand and stands up. “You should try to get some rest,” She says gently, then walks over to Mac, who can’t seem to make himself move and get out of this awkward situation. 

“Sorry, I shouldn’t have been listening,” Mac says, scuffing a shoe on the floor.

“It’s not like it’s some big secret,” Desi says. “My family isn’t ashamed of their past, neither am I. We are what we are. Life was hard, I was a child for the worst but I remember some things. It’s never been easy for me to get the life my family wanted for me, but I’ve tried to make them proud. And I know they love me enough to sacrifice their world for me. Some days that’s the only thing that’s gotten me off the ground.” 

Mac nods.  _ She doesn’t care if the rest of her team knows how hard her life has been. She’s honest and open. Maybe I should be too. _

“Uh, Desi?”

She tilts her head, like Mickey does when he’s curious. “Yes, Mac?”

And then Jack comes rushing in from the front of the clinic, accompanied by the sound of screeching tires. “Guys, we got company. Lots of company.”

Mac allows himself a momentary curse at the universe for always seeing fit to interrupt his attempts at telling people the truth before he returns his focus to Jack’s sitrep. 

“There’s two truckloads of armed men pulling up out front. They’re yelling in Romanian, it was too fast for me to follow but Dr. Terzic says they’re demanding she turn over the guard and the refugees and they won’t kill her.”

“So they don’t know there are American agents here?” Desi asks.

“Apparently not. My guess is, they had someone on the road who saw the truck and recognized some of the people riding in it.” He sighs. “They gave her ten minutes to make a decision or they will come in and take what they want by force.”

“Ten minutes?” Mac says. “Might be enough time to plan a pretty exciting welcoming committee.” He glances at Dr. Terzic. “This…uh…might be a little rough on your clinic. I promise the people we work for will reimburse you.”

“If you can really stop these men you can burn it to the ground,” The doctor replies. “I hate knowing people like him are preying on innocent families and helpless children. Very few escape, but I have seen some of the ones who do.” Her eyes are fierce. “Tell me what to do to help.”

“Get me all the cleaning chemicals you have. And we need to barricade the entrance.” Mac glances around the room. “Move anything you can in front of those windows and the door.” Bilal, Nazir, Jack and Desi rush to do just that. 

“Jack, wait,” Mac says.  _ He shouldn’t be moving heavy things around right after he just gave blood.  _ “I’m gonna need some help putting together some chemical grenades.”

“Oh cool.” Jack says, turning around. 

Mac grabs the cleaning supplies Dr. Terzic returns with, and sets them, a box of surgical gloves, and a basket of ratty stuffed animals on an exam table. He’s pouring things into gloves that Jack’s holding open when Desi walks in. 

“What else should we do?” She asks. 

“Here, you can help with this. Cut those open,” Mac says, pointing to the stuffed animals. “We’re going to use those as a little extra weight for these chemical grenades.”

Desi pulls out a knife and picks up a bear. “Ooh, cute but packs a punch.”

“So kinda like you?” Jack asks.

“Call me cute again and you will see how much of a punch I pack.” She slits a seam open easily and hands the bear to Mac, who ties off one glove and tucks it inside. When they’re finished, there’s a neat little row of explosive toys set on the exam table, and several empty chemical jugs. 

“This is all you have?” Mac asks Dr. Terzic.

“Yes, I’m sorry. We are not a large clinic so we do not keep a large stock of supplies.” 

He nods. “Then I guess this will do.” He puts the animals back in the basket, gently, to avoid jostling them and setting off a premature reaction. “Jack, take these and put them in the first turn of the hallway, okay?”

He nods and hurries off. Mac starts to follow him, but Desi stops him with a hand on his arm. He turns and glances at her. 

“Mac, if we die here…”

“We’re not gonna die.” Mac says confidently. 

“Just let me say it, okay? There’s no one I’d rather go out with than you and Jack. Okay?” She glances at him. “I’m sorry for…well, a lot of things I did when we first met. I misjudged you and I shouldn’t have treated you the way I did.”

Mac shrugs. “Everyone does, at first.”

“Doesn’t make it right.” She reaches out her hand. “I know the fist-bump is you and Jack’s thing, but…” She holds out her hand. 

Mac pushes his fist against hers. “It can be our thing too.” 

* * *

BOZER KNEW THIS WAS GOING TO BE BAD NEWS

“I’m so sorry, Bozer.” Riley’s voice is soft through the helmet, and choked with suppressed tears. “We caught the Ghost, but he says there’s no way to shut off the bomb.”

“At least you got him. That’s something, right?” Bozer says.  _ I won’t die for nothing. He made a mistake that led Riley right to him, and now one very dangerous bomb maker is off the streets. For good.  _

“Riley?”

“Yeah, Boze?” Her cheeks are smeared with tear streaks. 

“I...in case I don’t…”

“Don’t say that. We’re gonna figure this out. We’re going to get you out of there.”

He shakes his head. “Please, Riley, I have to tell you. Remember when we first met, and I had the biggest crush on you?” She smiles weakly, and looks confused. “I thought we were meant to be. And then things happened.” He swallows. “But what I wanted to say is, Riley...I’m glad you don’t hate me for it.”

“I never did, Bozer.” She looks up, eyes glossy with tears. “I never hated you. Might have thought you were a little...overwhelming sometimes. But...I can’t imagine what I’d do without you now, so don’t make me have to live it. Okay?”

She reaches up and pulls off her helmet, then starts shedding the top half of her bomb suit. 

“What are you doing?” Bozer asks. 

“If you take your foot off that brake, both of us are going to die. And I know you wouldn’t do that to me, Bozer. We’re gonna figure this out.” She looks at him. “Please. You’re stronger than that. You never let what happened to Jerry or Mac or your mother break you. Don’t let this.” 

Her words send a stab of ice down his spine.  _ All my life I’ve thought it should have been me. That if anyone was going to be hurt, I should have been.  _

“I was supposed to go with him, Riley.” Bozer says thickly. He’s never told anyone this. Ever. But just in case his foot slips, he thinks he should get it off his chest. “Jerry always asked me to come to his band’s performances, and I always did. And then that week, at the last minute my film group rescheduled a night shoot, and I told him I’d have to back out. I could tell it broke his heart, but I was thinking this was it, this was when I was gonna finally break into the bigtime, and then I’d be able to take care of us all. I was so focused on that that I let my little brother walk to his gig alone for the first time.” 

Now he’s the one crying so hard he can’t see. 

“It’s my fault Riley. All of it. Jerry, Mac, this…it’s all my fault.”

“Bozer,  _ look at me! _ ” Riley’s voice is close to a scream. “It is not your fault. All of us make choices, and all of us have to live with them. I have dead people on my conscience too. But that is no reason to think that means you deserve to die to pay for it.” Her hand is pressed against the window glass. “After Nepal…it was the first time I’d lost people on my team, and it was because I was too stubborn to leave when they told me I should have. I was a wreck, Bozer. I just hid in my apartment and cried all the time. Jack came over and I wouldn’t open the door for him so he broke in through a window.” Bozer manages a weak chuckle at the thought. “I screamed at him to get out, told him he should have left me in that cave to die, because I deserved it. And he let me yell, just stood there until I’d stopped screaming and throwing pillows at him.” She gives him a shaky smile. “He was still holding onto one of the pillow shams, I remember I thought it looked funny and I was so close to hysterical I almost laughed. He just sat down on the end of my bed and he looked me in the eyes and said, ‘We all make mistakes, the trick is to learn to live with them’.” 

Bozer’s been told over and over that mistakes are what you  _ learn from. _ But this…this is new. From the look on Riley’s face, it was news to her too when Jack said it.  _ Learn to live with them. _ Bozer’s good at learning what he did wrong. But moving on is so much harder. 

“Living with what we do is something every agent has to learn. And I’m sorry you had to learn it on your own. But Bozer, mistakes don’t mean you have to be stuck in them. You have to keep living.”

He nods slowly.  _ I can’t change what happened. But I can do the best I can with the rest of my life. Whatever happens. _

He raises his hand and presses it to Riley’s against the glass. She gives him another watery smile. “I’m gonna figure this out, I promise. Because I am  _ not _ gonna tell my little brother he lost another sibling when he gets home.” 

Bozer nods. 

“I would have done anything to take their place. I keep thinking about that. I wish it had been me. And somehow this felt like…like the universe was giving me that wish in a really sick way.” 

“Bozer, that’s it. You’re a genius!” Riley gasps.

“What? I just told you I was thinking about taking my foot off that brake to make up for what happened to Jerry and Mac?”

“You wanted to take their place. Bozer, I think I know what we have to do.”

“Time travel?” Bozer knows that’s not what she means but he’s starting to feel lightheaded. 

“I need another car to stand in for Mac’s. Trick the onboard computer that’s going to trigger the bomb into thinking that you’re still inside when we get you out.” 

“You can do that?”

“Yeah. Matty! We need an identical jeep!” She shouts. “Bozer, just hang in there a little longer.”

“I’m trying. My leg’s shaking pretty bad,” He admits. 

“Mountain climbers call that ‘Elvis Leg’, you know,” Riley says.

“How would you know that?” Bozer asks.  _ Anything to get my mind off this situation. _

“It sounded like a fun vacation idea. And then we actually had to do it for an op and I decided it wasn’t so fun after all. My whole body felt like I’d been run through a washing machine. I didn’t even know there were that many muscles in a human body, much less that all of them were capable of aching at the same time.” 

Bozer laughs. “Mac tried to teach me to parkour when he was first starting out as a vigilante.” He can’t help but grimace at the memory. “It was fun the first day. The second day I tried to vault a fence and it felt like my legs were jello. I got stuck on top of it. Stuck. Mac was laughing too hard to get me  _ down _ for a good five minutes.” He shrugs. “Figured I’d stick to fake movie stunts and leave the crazy stuff to Mac.”

_ Those were the days when I thought life that way was gonna go on forever. I just kinda figured Mac would always sneak out at night to save the world, and I’d keep writing b-grade scripts, and the world would spin on.  _

He’s not entirely sure how they got here. Bozer loves planning scripts. He’s always been fond of finding the inciting incident, the one thing that gets the whole story in motion. The catalyst that kicks the heroes off their couches and throws them into the action. 

He’s always felt like Jerry’s death was  _ their _ inciting incident.  _ If he hadn’t died, Mac wouldn’t have wanted to become a vigilante. Momma wouldn’t have gone downhill. Mac could have gone off to a good college instead of worrying about helping take care of the family.  _

And all this time, Bozer’s been living with the thought that it’s his fault.  _ Because I blamed myself for Jerry’s death, I blamed myself for everything that came after. _ He has to let that go. 

A blue jeep pulls into the driveway, and Riley glances back at it. “I have to go try and clip into that car’s computer, okay? I’ll be back.” 

Bozer watches her work, connecting the onboard computers to her rig and working her magic on them. He takes deep, slow breaths.  _ Almost done. Almost there. Just hang on and give her a little more time to work. Just hang on. _

It almost sounds like Jerry’s voice in his head. That relentless encouragement. Praising even his worst attempts at filmmaking. Jerry always believed in his big brother.  _ He would tell me I could do this. He would. _ Bozer wishes his little brother could see him now.  _ A real spy. Not just one in a movie.  _ He smiles sadly.  _ Life didn’t go the way any of us expected. _ And that has to be okay.

Riley tapping on the window pulls him out of his thoughts. “How much do you weigh?” 

“One-eighty-three.” Bozer says. 

“You sure?”

“That’s what they said at my last physical. Last month. You can check.” He shakes his head. “I’m not gonna lie about my weight when my life is on the line.” 

“Okay. Well, we’re almost ready, Bozer. I’ll tell you when it’s safe to get out, okay?” She says. “We’re gonna be fine. It’s gonna be fine.” 

He nods.

Riley steps back, picking up her rig. He can see her talking to someone who’s getting into the blue jeep and pressing down the brake. Then she turns back to him, and he can see every ounce of fear and friendship and determination in her eyes when she yells, so loud he can hear her perfectly through the distance and the glass. 

“NOW, BOZER!” 

He shoves the door open and dives to the ground, half expecting to be engulfed in a fireball. Nothing happens.

He scrambles to his feet, his exhausted leg shaking and refusing to hold him up. Riley shakes off the hands trying to hold her behind the concrete blast barrier that the bomb team brought, and races to him. She scoops her arm under his shoulder and pulls him behind the barrier with the rest of the team. 

“It’s over,” She pants. “We’re okay.”

Bozer nods, then rests his head against her shoulder, while she leans her cheek on his head. He can feel her bone-deep sobs in her chest. He feels the ground shake as a crane lowers a massive concrete box over the jeep, then a heavy rattling explosion as the man in the mirror jeep takes his foot off the brake. But none of it is stronger than the cries that shake him and Riley both. Years and years of heartbreak and loss and desperation finally washing away.  _ If this is what it took, then I can’t regret it. _

Bozer takes a deep breath, smelling smoke and salt tears.  _ We’re alive. We’re going to be okay. _

* * *

THEIR TEN MINUTES JUST RAN OUT

Jack glances at the window, where the men with big trucks and big guns are waiting.  _ Well, it comes down to this. Whether Mac’s crazy plan can hold them off.  _ He turns to the doctor and the group of refugees. “You need to leave before this gets bad. I figure those men are gonna concentrate their attack on those front doors. Open a window at the back and climb out.” The doctor nods.

“What about Felix?”

“Mac built a small stretcher. Nazir, Bilal, you can carry him, right?” 

“Of course.”

“Then you’ll be taking him with you. Now go. Don’t climb out until you hear them break in, the chaos from the fight should give you enough cover to slip away into the woods. Don’t stop, don’t come back. Just get to safety.”

Dr. Terzic nods and leads the others away. Jack rests a hand on Mac’s shoulder, lowering his voice.

“Mac, you take them and get outta here.”

Mac shakes his head vehemently. “I’m not leaving you.”

“Yes, you are.” Jack takes him by the shoulders and pulls him a little out of the way of earshot of the others. “You are going with them because those guys could have been planning to do  _ anything _ to these people once they got them across the border. I know this looks like just a smuggling operation, but smuggling is one step away from trafficking. And so help me you are never gonna end up in something like that.” Jack’s voice cracks. “Mac, twice now I have watched helplessly while someone else hurt you. I can’t do it again.”

“None of that was your fault,” Mac insists. 

Jack pushes on, this is the one time he intends not to let Mac talk over him or out-argue him. “I am so sorry I ever let Murdoc get his hands on you. I promised you it wouldn’t happen and then I let you down. You need to go. Now. Please.” 

Mac nods slowly. 

“What about you and Desi?”

“We’ll either beat them or go down fighting. That’s kinda how we’ve expected to go out since we started this job.” Jack glances over his shoulder at where Desi is giving her gun a final check. “For people like us, this is the most likely end of the line. We’ve both known that for a long time. If I’m gonna die, I’d like it to be saving you. You gonna take that from me?”

Mac swallows hard.

“Listen, kiddo. I know this is tough, I know you don’t want to walk away. But please. If I die today I can’t let that be for nothing.” He looks Mac in the eyes, biting his lip at the sight of the tears flooding them. “You have to stay safe. You have to. That’s what I want.” He gently brushes a falling tear off Mac’s cheek with his thumb. “That’s my job, kiddo. I’m your dad. I keep you safe.” 

Mac nods softly, his hands coming up to grip Jack’s wrists, more tears trickling down his face. “Okay, I’m going.” He lets go long enough to scrub his arm across his face, only succeeding in smearing the tear tracks and staining his sleeve, then turns around to the group of waiting refugees. 

“We have to go. They’re going to buy us time.” 

Jack watches till the kid’s back disappears around a corner. _Damn it, you better go._ _For once in your life, listen to me._

“They’re coming,” Desi says. “Just got in their trucks. They’re gonna ram the doors.”

“Yeah, that’s what I figured.” Jack tosses her half the stuffed animal grenades. “You ready?”

“You kidding?”

This isn’t close to the first time Jack’s defended a building being breached. The smash of glass as the truck comes in through the doors barely makes him flinch. As soon as the men open the door, he pops up from behind the reception desk and flings one of Mac’s grenades inside. The glove bursts and a chemical gas floats out. An unexpected side effect is the way the chemical combination ignites the cloth on the seat where it fell, turning the truck into a flaming barrier. 

_ Nice, kid. _

Jack runs, watching the men scrambling out of the vehicle, coughing on the fumes and trying to escape before the vehicle blows. He dives behind a desk barrier with Desi just as the explosion rips through the air. 

Unfortunately, it doesn’t stop the assault on the clinic. Jack hears boots pounding in the hallway, and throws another grenade at the same time Desi throws one of her own. The resulting smoke cloud drifts back to them, and Desi pulls up her shirt, coughing. 

“Maybe next time…” She sputters, “We should coordinate that a little better. Say ‘Mine’ if you’re gonna throw one, okay?”

“Yep.” Jack ducks back down as a rattle of gunfire takes out a chunk of the wall behind them. “Mine!” he flings a grenade in the general direction of the attack, and ducks.

They repeat the process until both their hands are empty.  _ Hopefully they’re pretty disoriented now. And the hallway should bottleneck them.  _ They have decent cover, but in order to actually shoot, they’re going to have to break it.  _ Well, this could end badly. But then again, so could any op. _

“Ready to make our last stand?” Jack asks. 

“Hell yeah.” Desi gives him a feral grin. “Figured I was gonna die with you years ago.” She slams her last mag into her gun. “Let’s take some of these bastards with us, huh?”

Jack nods, then frowns. The air is heavy with the stinging chemicals from Mac’s grenades, but something else now as well.  _ Yuck, it smells like leaving a stove burner on… _

“Ugh, what is that  _ smell?” _ Desi asks. “It’s like…gas.”

“Cover your nose!” Jack says. “Get down on the ground.”  _ This feels…like a Mac move. Damn it all. _

Suddenly, a voice echoes in the hallway. “I’d suggest you all lay down your guns now.” It is Mac. “Because if anyone fires off another shot, the amount of gas in the air now will ignite and this whole building will blow.”

Jack hears the click and thud of guns being placed on the floor, and the sharp sizzle of zipties being used. Then two heavy-duty masks thump over the side of the desk. Jack and Desi pick them up and put them on, then stand up to face a similarly masked Mac, who shrugs and glances behind him at the smugglers tied up on the floor.

“What did you do?” Jack asks.

“Diverted the gas line into the ventilation system,” Mac says. “Just enough to make it smell pretty nasty. I wasn’t actually gonna risk your lives.” 

“Where is everyone else?”

“Snuck around front and Bilal and I took out the two guys guarding the place. Dr. Terzic took the truck and she’s driving Sana, Yasmin, and Felix to safety. Bilal and Nazir stayed behind with me to work on the vent system. They’re waiting with the smugglers’ vehicle.”

“Mac, I told you to run.” Jack says as they stumble outside into the fresh air. Jack leans against the partially smashed and scorched concrete wall and slides down it, pulling off his mask. 

“You said you wanted me safe,” Mac says. “You never asked me what I wanted. I wanted  _ you _ safe.”

“Damn it, kiddo.” Jack sighs. “You know it woulda killed me to see them get their hands on you, right?”

“They didn’t.” Mac insists, hauling Jack to his feet with a hand around his wrist. “Now I just want to go home. Can we go home?” 

* * *

PHOENIX HOLDING ROOMS

NOT THE MOST NORMAL PLACE FOR A FAMILY REUNION

Matty ushers Annabelle and Maria Pena through the doors of the holding room. “We’ll leave you alone to talk, okay?” She says. “My associate and I will be watching from outside, but you can have this time alone.”

Maria nods, glancing across the table at her husband before pressing a hand to her mouth to stifle a sob. Matty closes the door and steps to the observation window, moving up beside Riley, who insisted on coming. Bozer’s in Medical being treated for mild shock, and Riley was staying with him, but when she heard the Penas were coming, she’d asked to be allowed to come with Matty.

Maria seems incapable of more than a broken gasping sob as she sinks into a chair. Annabelle, on the other hand, rushes to where Alfred is still cuffed to the table.

“Papa?” Anabelle whispers. “Your face looks funny.”

“I know,  _ mi princesa. _ ” He takes her hand and presses it to the undamaged skin on the other side of his face. “But see? Still me.”

She nods, smiling just a little. “I missed you.”

“I missed you too.” He gathers Annabelle into his arms, as much as his cuffs will allow. “I have to go somewhere for a while, but just know that I love you and I am going to think of you every single day.” He pushes her hair back from her face, looking at her gently. “I love you and I am so proud of you. You’re a brave girl.”

“Like you. Mama says you were the bravest person she knew.” Annabelle says. “I want to be just like you.”

Pena smiles sadly. “No, no you don’t. You want to be just like  _ you. _ ” He hugs her one more time. “Now I have to leave, but I promise I’ll see you again as soon as I can. Okay?”

“Okay.” 

Maria stands up, and walks around to kneel beside the chair where Alfred is sitting. He cups her chin in his hand and whispers something in Spanish too low for Matty to hear, then brushes a tear off his wife’s cheek. She lowers her face to his chest and cries, but then stands up, brushing the tears away, and reaches for Annabelle. 

“Come, we have to go now.” She steps to the door, and Matty opens it to let them out.

“Thank you,” Maria says, still wiping away her tears, as two guards move forward to escort them out. “Thank you for letting us be together one more time.” The two of them disappear through the security doors at the end of the hall. 

“What’s going to happen now?” Riley asks. Matty glances at her. Riley looks exhausted, and her face is still stained with tear streaks she only half managed to wash off. 

“The Ghost is still guilty of numerous international crimes. He will be serving a life sentence in a Phoenix holding site.” Matty doesn’t see a point in trying to soften reality. “However, he’ll be receiving an experimental treatment that may help restore his memories. I’ve reached out to DARPA, to someone I know there who is a pioneer in treating cases like this. As long as Pena signs off on the experiment waivers, he’ll become part of her test pool and hopefully be able to reach some level of rehabilitation.” 

“And his family?”

“I’ve pulled some strings, to make sure Annabelle will be able to see her father in something other than a prison waiting room. The site he’s being remanded to is remote, and there is ample outdoor space for supervised visits, provided Pena continues to be a model inmate, and contingent in part on how well his treatment progresses if he chooses to participate.” 

“I just…” Riley swallows. “I’m glad something good came out of this.” 

_ She sees herself. The little girl desperately hoping to reconnect with an errant father who has a chance of changing his ways.  _ Matty knows things with Elwood are currently at an uneasy peace; he took Diane’s engagement pretty hard. Riley hasn’t said much about him lately. 

“Me too, Riley.” Matty nods. It’s not often that a story as violent as the Ghost’s has anything approaching a happy ending. But it’s days like this that make all the other things Matty sees at this job worth it. The little sparks of hope in the world. The reminders that while no one is perfect, no one can be written off as a monster either.  _ We see a lot of the worst of humanity, doing this job. But we can also see the best in it. _

Matty is the head of an agency, she can’t afford to form attachments to everyone she’s come in contact with. But the four classified files on her tablet, the ones locked to her retinal scan in order to be opened, are a slight violation of that rule. 

_ Valerie Lawson. Annabelle Pena. Ethan Jericho. Abina Davis.  _ And in the last month, after hearing Mac’s post-mission debrief, she’s added a fifth.  _ Cassian. _

One of Matty’s best traits is that she has one eye on the future. The team of Mac, Jack, Riley, Bozer and Cage just fell into her lap, already brought together by the oddest circumstances. She can’t guarantee such talented people would find their way to each other again by chance. She has no intentions to push things, but when and if the time comes, she wants to be sure that invitations to work for the Phoenix find their way into every one of those people’s hands. 

_ I’ve seen proof, over and over, that a father’s legacy does not define the life of the child. _ And she’s willing to put that into action. 

* * *

HOME AGAIN

APPARENTLY A LOT HAPPENED

The moment Mac, Jack, and Desi boarded the Phoenix jet, prisoners in tow (slightly the worse for wear for being left in a car for several hours, but nonetheless intact), a call had come in from Matty on the screen. 

She’d glossed over details, but the big picture was painfully evident. Bozer had a near miss as the victim of a car bomb meant for Mac, the Ghost is in custody, and both Riley and Bozer have been sent home for mandated three day time off periods. 

Mac paces the whole flight home. He knows Matty said Bozer and Riley were fine but he won’t believe that till he sees it in person. Even Matty telling him that she's pulling strings to get Nazir, Yasmin, Bilal, and Sana priority relocation and asylum doesn't soothe the ache in his chest. Jack and Desi both try to calm him down, but nothing they say is going to make this better. Jack hands him paperclips, and Mac goes through the whole handful in half an hour, mostly shapes of cars and explosions and a couple movie cameras. 

He was surprised when Desi gave him all three of their broken phones.

“You hung onto them?” Mac had asked, fairly shocked. 

“Well, they weren’t any good as phones, but you seem to have a knack for using them for everything but their intended purpose, so I figured I’d better not throw them away.” 

Mac honestly hadn’t expected it. He didn’t think Desi was a fan of his weird plans, much less would have supplies on hand for those plans. But taking the phones apart and pulling out the useful bits to tuck in his jacket pockets and knapsack kept him occupied for a decent amount of time.

Still, by the time they land in L.A., he’s a strung ball of nerves. Jack drives them home, in a Phoenix SUV that was waiting for them thanks to Mac’s current lack of a functioning car, and the second they get there (passing a massive scorched spot in the driveway that makes shivers run down his spine) Mac is  _ running  _ out to the deck, where he sees Bozer leaning on the railing looking out at the city.

“Bozer!”

Bozer looks up, grinning. “Sorry, Mac, you need a new car.”

“I’m just glad you’re alive.” Mac pulls Bozer into a crushing hug. “I’m so sorry I wasn’t here for you.”

“It’s okay, Mac. We can’t always stop everything bad from happening to the people we care about. And it worked out alright anyway.” Somehow Mac has the feeling Bozer is talking about more than just today. He and Riley have been exchanging sadly knowing glances, but in that way that Mac knows well means a secret was shared, and a painful one at that. “We make the best choices we can in that moment. You saved a lot of lives today. I would never want you to feel guilty for not being here, no matter what had happened.” He looks Mac in the eyes. “Please, promise me. If something ever does go wrong, don’t let it eat away at you. That’s no way to live.”

Mac nods. Despite the fact that Bozer almost died today, there’s some kind of light in his eyes. Like a haunted shadow has slipped away. Mac doesn’t think he’s seen this since Jerry was shot.  _ Something happened today.  _ But whatever it is is between Bozer and Riley, and Mac won’t pry until Bozer is willing to talk. He knows how that works. 

“Jill says one of her friends is selling a used Toyata Tacoma,” Bozer offers, clearly trying to push the conversation into less troubled waters. “I know, it’s kind of an eyesore, but…”

“But since my track record with trying to lease anything is an absolute disaster, and I’m probably gonna kill it in a year, I might as well buy it outright.” Mac finishes. 

He sits down by the fire, declining the beer Matty offers. He doesn’t need alcohol right now, it seems like a bad idea. Riley is tossing sticks into the flames, her eyes somewhere a million miles away.

“Matty says you did a pretty good job being me today,” Mac says. “According to her you figured out the plan to mirror the car systems.”

“Actually, it was something Bozer said.” Riley takes a deep breath. “You ever wonder what things would be like if something different happened a long time ago?”

Mac nods, resting an arm on his knee. “Yeah, I do. But…” He snaps a twig and tosses it into the blaze. “Can’t go back. And I think we’re doing pretty well.” He puts an arm around her shoulders. 

Riley sighs, twirling her bottle in her fingers. “Pena will go to prison, but he’ll be getting the help he needs now. Hopefully medical treatment won’t be too late to bring back some of the man he was.” 

Mac nods, unable to say anything. 

_ I know what it’s like now. To lose yourself, to be twisted into something you never thought you could become. _ Memories of what happened while he was with James are still a little hazy, but he remembers helping build the bomb that hurt Jill, remembers holding a gun on Jack.  _ I can’t find it in me to blame Pena for what he’s done. _ Because Mac knows now how close he came to doing the same.  _ It’s only because Jill didn’t die that I’m not in exactly the same position. _

“I just hope…I hope things work out okay for Annabelle and her mom. Like…It’s tough when you know the person you should be able to look up to as a role model is exactly what you never want to be, you know?”

“I do.” Mac knows her experience wasn’t the same, she actually knew her dad was a shitty parent, while Mac grew up wondering who James even was.  _ But now…yeah. It sucks trying to live down what your family legacy became. _ “But she’s got a lot of good people around her.” 

Riley nods. “Just takes one to keep you out of the deep end.” She glances at Jack, who’s talking to Bozer now. 

Mac nods. He stands up and walks over. 

“Oh, don’t mind us, we’re just comparing near-death Ghost encounters,” Jack says, slinging an arm around Bozer’s shoulder. “Sorry Mac, but the ‘survived bombs planted in vehicles meant for other people’ club appears to be full.” 

“Hey, I had one of his bombs  _ in this house, _ in case you forgot.” Mac chuckles.  _ Of course those two are joking. _

“Jack says you shouldn’t buy the Toyota,” Bozer says. 

“Why?”

“There’s a GTO in thirty pieces in that body shop garage, dude, we gotta get to work on that thing.” 

“How am I gonna get us to work?” Mac says. “We can’t drive the Shelby every day.”

“Besides, that’s my car,” Riley interjects.

Jack rolls his eyes. “Dude, have you  _ seen  _ that truck? It looks like someone let their child design it. That’s not even a real truck. That’s a wanna-be. Do you want to take that thing to the ranch? You’ll get laughed outta Texas, dude.” 

Mac shakes his head.  _ Oh Jack. _

The lighthearted mood lasts long enough for Bozer, Riley, Desi, and Matty to get tired and head back to their respective homes. But when it’s just him and Jack, Mac finds himself wandering away from the fire and the happy thoughts, to the edge of the deck and the edges of the darkness creeping in, pushing at the dying firelight.

He can feel rather than see Jack come up to stand beside him. 

“Hey, kiddo. What’s wrong?”

“Everything.” Mac bites his lip, hard. Hoping he won’t start crying. “James is in custody. Murdoc is in a black site. The Ghost is in prison.” 

“Yeah, and none of them are gonna hurt you any more.” 

_ That’s not really the problem.  _ It’s not that Mac doesn’t feel safe, well, okay, maybe he never will again, really, not in the depths of his bones. It’s more like he feels hollowed out and empty. So much of the past has been tied up in trying to find closure with all three of those people. With James it’s been a decade. With Pena it’s been years, and also with Murdoc. 

“I…how weird is it to use a  _ Princess Bride _ quote right now?”

“Dude, you know there’s never a wrong time to quote the  _ Princess Bride _ .” 

“I just…you know at the end? When Inigo says he’s been in the revenge business so long he’s not sure what to do now that it’s over?” 

Jack nods, clearly waiting for the explanation but wisely saying nothing.

“Well, it’s not really revenge, but…where do I go from here?” He’s had this hollow feeling since he watched Jack cuff Murdoc. Like something is over, and he doesn’t know how to start again.  _ I know that sounds sick, and that Murdoc would enjoy hearing how big a part he was of my life. But it’s the truth. Chasing him down has been something I’ve done for years. And now with all the people who were my problems finally off the board…what comes in their place? _ He’s afraid it will be bad. He knows better than to assume it’s going to be good.

_ Maybe I should get out of the game while I can. Call it quits. _ But he also knows he won’t. Because somewhere out there, that next thing is waiting, biding its time. And he needs to be here ready to fight it when it finally shows its face.

Jack finally clears his throat, filling what has become an uncomfortable silence. “I know you’re just lettin’ a bunch o’ thoughts tumble around in that head of yours that you’re not tellin’ me about. You wanna clue me in?”

Mac nods.  _ If there’s one thing I’ve learned living with Jack, it’s that sooner or later I end up telling him everything.  _ “I just…I wonder what’s next.”

“Ok?”

“Like…everything’s done. If this was a book this should be where it ends. But that’s not how life works. And I just…I feel like there’s something dark lurking around the corner. Something to take the place of everything I just got to put behind me.” 

Jack sighs. “I do too, kiddo.”

Mac looks up. _That is…not really what I was hoping he’d say._ _I was kind of looking for reassurance that I’m overreacting and being emotional about stuff._

Jack takes a deep breath and looks out over the city lights. “Not gonna lie to you, kiddo, that’s what this life does to you. Makes you paranoid. Makes you jump at shadows and see them where they’re not. But sometimes you see them where they are. You’ve been in the game too long to think that one big win is the end of it all.” His voice is soft and steady. “As long as you do this job, there’s always gonna be one of those little black clouds on the horizon. Creeping closer or maybe even bearing down on you. But it’s always gonna be there. There’s always another battle to fight. It’s what made comin’ home from the Sandbox so hard. I’ll never really be out. Not even when I finally quit this job, if I make it that far. But that’s the sacrifice we make for what we do. Trading our own peace of mind to protect everyone else’s.” 

Mac nods. “And…every time we go out there, I know that’s what I’m meant to do. That I’m right where I should be, where I’m supposed to be. So why do I feel so lost?” 

“You’re not lost, Mac. We’ve got you.” Jack’s arms are around his shoulders, and Mac leans into that, trying to breathe. Trying to push down the pain and loss. He’s tried to lay his demons to rest, but maybe that’s only ever been half the battle.  _ Now that they’re gone I need to build something up in their place. Something good. _ He’s worked hard to shake the memory of James’s voice in his mind, the thought of Murdoc’s hands on his body, memories of the good man Pena used to be haunting his dreams. But he can’t just leave nothing there. He needs to fill those gaps with his family. With Riley’s laughs and Diane’s hugs and Jack’s warm, calloused hands. With Bozer’s smiles and even Desi’s attempts at forging a friendship.  _ Time to make room for something new. _


	21. No Go+High Voltage+Rescue

###  320-No Go+High Voltage+Rescue

PARIS

THIS CITY IS OFFICIALLY NOT A ROMANTIC DESTINATION ANYMORE

Last time Jack set foot in the City of Lights, he spent the better part of his time in the city sewers. He's willing to concede that this mission is slightly better. Not by much, though, because they're currently being pursued by what looks like half the Paris police, and Matty has just politely informed them that if they get caught they will be disavowed.

_ It was bad enough replicating the part of Les Mis spent crawling around the city sewer. Don't think I want to be like Jean Valjean enough to spend half my life in a French prison.  _ Granted, a stolen flash-drive with classified documents is probably  _ slightly _ more incriminating than a loaf of bread.  _ Think we'd be forgiven when we told them we took it off a traitor who is planning an assassination attempt? _

"You guys were supposed to be keeping a low profile," Riley says. "Stealing the French president's limo is literally the exact opposite of that."

"Not my fault!" Jack shouts. "Desi was in charge of that part!" He glances at her. "Why did you steal the most conspicuous thing in the parking lot?"

Desi shrugs, she’s mostly focused on the road, but Jack can tell she’s annoyed. Mostly at their current situation, but probably a little bit at him too. ”You said 'get a vehicle and meet us around front'. Your exact words, Jack."

"Vehicle? Who says vehicle? I said car, Desi!"

"No, actually, Jack, you did say vehicle," Mac adds unhelpfully from the back seat.

Jack shakes his head. "You and your eclectic memory.” Mac’s unintentional undermining of his position is not really helping the whole situation, but it’s  _ Mac, _ so Jack is willing to forgive. 

"Eidetic, Jack."

"Besides, it’s a sweet ride," Desi says.

"Great, I'm sure we 'll all have fond memories of our little joyride for the next fifty years we spend in a dark cell," Jack grumbles. 

"In case you forgot, we had people  _ shooting at us. _ " Desi says, taking both hands off the wheel for a moment to wave emphatically. "This is the one car I knew would be bulletproof." She shrugs. "Whose fault is  _ that, _ huh?"

_ Okay, mine. _ Jack blames stupid architectural design choices.  _ Tiny little hallways that someone decided were the perfect place to put a bunch of decorative tables? Does no one ever run in those?  _ Actually, probably not.

There’s a loud bang, and Desi flinches, pulling the vehicle out of a swerve and skid. “Damn, they hit a tire.”

“Well, it didn’t stop us yet,” Jack observed. 

Riley’s voice comes over the comms. “I managed to get the schematics on the vehicle you stole. You have reinforced run-flat tires, which will give you about five more minutes.”

“Anything else helpful you can tell us?” Mac asks. He’s starting to get that look in his eyes that Jack knows means he’s cataloging what he has to work with. Jack can’t help but think it reminds him of the scene in the  _ Princess Bride _ when they’re planning to storm the castle. Except Mac is usually both the one with the plan  _ and _ the one who has everything they need to execute it.  _ And has in fact hatched crazier plots while recovering from being ‘mostly dead’.  _ The kid scares him. 

"Okay, this car is actually really well stocked," Riley says. "It's got shatterproof glass, bulletproof plating, and is hermetically sealed when the doors are closed. There's a compartment in the back behind the seats with all kinds of good stuff. Oxygen, gas masks, bags of the president's blood in case he needs a transfusion.”

"I think I have an idea," Mac says. “Desi, keep going, don’t slow down. Riley, find us an overpass or something else to pull into.” 

“I’m not even gonna ask,” Desi says, and floors it. 

Riley provides them a location. From the back, slightly muffled, Mac shouts to stop when they get inside. Desi looks like she’s about to argue, but Jack raises an eyebrow at her and whatever she’s going to say, she doesn’t.

As soon as she stops the car, Mac tosses two masks into the front seats. “Put those on, it’s gonna get hard to breathe,” He says, securing one over his own face. 

Jack slides his own mask on, it’s connected to a small oxygen cylinder. He and Mac and Desi all climb out of the car, and then Mac throws something on the ground. A rusty orange gas fills the air, and Mac yanks up a manhole cover. Jack groans.  _ Back into the city underbelly we go. _

Fortunately they’re not down there very long. Just long enough to pop out a mile or so down from the underpass, next to a river. 

“See, I totally stole the right vehicle,” Desi says, pulling her mask off and shaking out her hair. “Why don’t our Phoenix tac SUVs have all that in them?”

“Maybe you should take that up with R&D,” Jack chuckles. “Jill would probably enjoy retrofitting our fleet.” He grins. “I mean, I think paperclips and chewing gum should probably go on the list of standard stock items.” He went around at some point and dumped handfuls of paperclips in the cupholders of all their tac vehicles; he wanted to leave whole boxes in each but the Supplies division has put a moratorium on requisitioning more than five boxes of paperclips at a time. Jack thinks that’s his fault.  _ What? I need one box in my pocket, one in my tac vest, one in my go bag, one in my car, one in my locker, two on the jet… _ He’s got more paperclip stashes than he does extra mags for his gun. 

“Maybe we should do personal cars too. Cause dude, the only way I will accept that rolling monstrosity you just bought is if we can turn it into something like that." Jack grins.

"Stop hating on my Toyota," Mac mutters.

"It  _ is _ pretty ugly," Desi offers. 

"Stop siding with Jack.”

“Eventually you and I are gonna get the GTO back together and be riding in  _ style,”  _ Jack says. That’s going to take a  _ lot _ of doing. But they’ll get there.

“You could always ride with me,” Desi says.  _ “My _ baby is in pristine condition.”  _ Sure, rub it in. _

“Yeah, but then I’d have to put up with your driving and your music choices,” Jack scoffs good-naturedly. “I think I can handle a few more months of the Toyota.”

* * *

PHOENIX LABS

IT IS GOOD TO BE BACK

Bozer kind of feels like a conquering hero. People are giving him high fives and grins and just generally worshipping the ground he walks on. It’s been that way for the past week, ever since the Ghost.  _ It’s not like I even did anything awesome. Riley tracked him down, and she’s the one who figured out how to defuse the bomb. _

Still, the attention is nice, while it lasts. Bozer knows in another week things will go back to normal and people will start dumping mask requisition requests and their ideas for how to program Sparky on to his desk again and barely glancing at him before going on about their day. But he doesn’t mind.

At the moment, he’s fine-tuning Sparky’s fine motor skills and running a diagnostic on why the emotion detection program seems to be glitching. He’s noticed it’s having a problem mapping Desi’s facial features, and he’s considering looping Riley in to see if her work with Friar can help them out.  _ I know most facial rec programs are skewed to demographic differences. _ He built Sparky’s with his own face as a base model, so his system doesn’t have the same bias that the general law enforcement database does, but it looks like he’s exchanged false positives on one ethnic feature variation for another. 

The doors open, and Mac walks in with a box of bagels. He stops to talk to Jill, and Bozer hears something to the effect of telling her to pass along a thank-you to her friend for selling him the truck. It’s been four days and Bozer still can’t get used to pulling into the driveway and seeing the boxy silver Toyota instead of Mac’s familiar burgundy jeep. He walked into the parking lot one day on his lunch break and wondered where Mac had gone before remembering the vehicle change.  _ You wouldn’t think you’d get so used to something like that. _

Mac grabs a spinning chair from an empty desk and slides it across the floor toward Bozer. He sits down next to him and glances at the program open on Bozer’s screen, overlapping Sparky’s diagnostic. 

"What's this?" Mac asks.

"A scoreboard," Bozer says, working hard to keep a straight face.

"They're going to kill you. Together." Mac says. Bozer can tell he’s struggling to repress a laugh at the sight of Jack with an axe and a dwarf helmet, and Desi with elf ears and a bow. 

"Had to put Riley's new deepfake program to good use," Bozer says. "How better than a digital tally count for our resident Legolas and Gimli?”

“Boze…” Mac says, and there’s a warning note in his voice. Bozer looks up, and then jumps. Desi is walking into the lab and right to his desk.  _ Oh shit.  _

He tries to use the keyboard shortcut to send the desktop to sleep, but he must type something in wrong, because it stays up and visible. He has to get that scoreboard down before she sees, because he has the feeling she will murder him. Slowly and painfully. Or at least make his life miserable for the next twenty years. 

He tries to close the program but whatever he typed froze his screen instead of sleeping it. He clicks more and more frantically, but it’s not doing any good, his cursor won’t move and now Desi is behind the desk, although Mac is doing his best to block her view of the screen with his body.

“Whoa, okay, a girl can take a hint,” Desi says, turning away. “I think this is something I do  _ not _ want to see.”

Bozer feels a flush creep up his cheeks, he knows what she’s thinking. And embarrassing himself with this little lapse of judgement is better than having her make  _ that _ assumption. About him or Mac or both of them. 

“Only if you hate Lord of the Rings,” He says slowly, turning his chair around and sliding back from the desk. Desi glances over Mac’s shoulder at the screen, and then starts laughing. 

Laughing so hard she’s bent over with one hand braced on the desk. Bozer can’t believe it. He was so sure she’d be pissed. She raises one shaking hand to point in the general direction of the screen and then laughs even harder. Bozer didn’t think it was  _ possible _ for Desi to crack up this badly. It reminds him of that time he and Mac were watching unpopular Disney movies and Mac lost it at the scene in  _ Chicken Little _ where the pig hyperventilated and sucked in his own paper bag. Bozer thought  _ Mac _ was going to need one. He’d sat there laughing and wheezing on the couch for a solid five minutes before he’d even been able to get a word out. Bozer had been considering calling an ambulance. Mac couldn’t even explain, later, why he’d found the scene  _ so _ funny. It just sort of happened. 

"Bozer, you should have said something. I've got like half this stuff for real from the past four years I was able to visit the Renaissance festival," Desi finally chokes out. 

"No way."

"Yep. A bunch of my college friends and I literally recreated the Fellowship of the Ring. I was the only one whose archery was any good, so I got to be Legolas.” She chuckles. “I am a bit of a closet geek.” 

“That. Is. Awesome.” Bozer grins.  _ I think I just found someone who won’t mind me asking to cast them in another short film.  _

“I mean, I've got a couple swords too, and a really nice dagger." She grins. "Jack doesn't get to criticize, not since I found out he keeps a Texas cavalry sword on display in his house.”

“Bagels!” Jill shouts, emerging from her office with both the box and a couple tubs of cream cheese spread from the fridge she has in there.  _ Leaving it in the general fridge meant we had to buy more every single week.  _ Jill is lactose intolerant, so she can be trusted to guard cream cheese. “First come first served!”

“Do I still get a bagel if I’m not a nerd?” Desi asks.

“Actually…” Mac pulls out a paper bag from his satchel. “Got you and Riley a more sugary option. Bear Claw for her, cream filled for you. I’d have got Jack one too, but he says he’s sworn off donuts now that he’s got a family.” 

“Thanks.” Desi takes the donut, biting in and then glancing appreciatively at the amount of cream that starts trying to escape. “Now if I could just get decent coffee around this place I’d be all set.” 

“You’re telling me,” Bozer says. “It’s sludge.” He shakes his head. “Mac, I think your next project should be fixing the part in the machine that’s dumping grounds into the pot.” 

“On it.” Mac laughs. “Sounds fun.” 

“Hey Bozer, we got the cinnamon sugar kind.” Jill says, holding out the box. 

“Well, seeing as I almost died a week ago…I think I’ll stick to the healthier options,” Bozer says. “You got some of the pumpkin spice ones, right, Mac?”

“You actually like those?” Desi asks. 

“As a matter of fact I do.” Bozer grabs one out of the box and waves it theatrically. “Yes, I am basic. I am just fine with that fact.” 

The door opens again, and Jack walks in. “Desi, what are you doing with the Geek Squad?”

“Having breakfast. And wishing I had coffee from my family’s place right now.” She grins. “What are  _ you _ doing down here?”

“Looking for Mac.” Jack says. “Good news on the GTO front. Apparently your guy Weathers just got one brought in for salvage, says we get first pickings. Want to go in after work? I wanted to know if I should tell Diane to wait din…”

He stops, looking over Desi’s arm, and Bozer suddenly remembers his screen is still frozen.  _ Oh no.  _

Desi saves him by saying something first. ”Okay, Jack, now you have a choice in the matter when we go to the RenFest. Kilt, or battle axe and dwarf beard."

Jack glowers. ”I am  _ not _ getting dragged along to this thing."

"Oh come on. Everyone should experience it once." Desi cuffs his shoulder. "Bozer already said he's in, and Riley too."

"Mac, are you and I the only sane ones?" Jack asks.

"Looks that way." Mac says. “Although…it does sound kind of cool."

"Dude, we went to  _ actual Scotland _ and got dragged into a reenactment. That was as much of a step into the past as I want to be part of.”

Mac’s phone buzzes, and he pulls it out. Bozer watches as his eyes go wide with stunned shock and a little fear. 

“Mac, what is it?”

* * *

Jack doesn’t like the look that spreads across his kid’s face at the sight of the text on his phone. His joking mood is instantly dispelled. “Kiddo, what’s that?”

“Frankie.” Mac swallows. “One of her grad students went missing. It’s all over the news.”

He holds out his phone, playing a video. It’s a couple holding a picture of a young man and a smiling girl. 

“Our son Ben and his girlfriend Isabelle went missing in Columbia three days ago. We’re reaching out to the international community for help. Please, find our son, and bring him home.” 

Mac hits pause. “Ben was Frankie’s lab assistant last semester, a senior doing his final project. She’s really upset.” He sighs. “But since they were in Columbia, a country with travel warnings, officially, the State department’s hands are tied. The U.S. can’t go in there to intervene in the situation.”

“But Phoenix can.” Jack stands up. “Tell Frankie we’re taking this to Matty.”  _ Those parents are getting their kids home safe.  _ Jack knows this isn’t an isolated incident. Kids go missing every day, some never to be seen again. But he can’t stomach the thought of letting this go without a fight.  _ I know how it feels.  _ He can’t help but remember what it was like to chase any lead, no matter how slim, praying that this would be the one, that he’d finally be able to bring his son home. He remembers how it felt when he lost track of Riley on an op in a country they weren’t officially even in, and defied every order and every protocol to find her.  _ Those parents can’t do what I can. So we need to do it for them. _

Mac nods, tapping at his phone, probably forwarding the message to Matty for review. Jack hopes she’ll greenlight the op; he knows these are hard calls but that’s what Phoenix is designed to handle.  _ We’re the people you call when you can’t call anyone else. _

By the time they get to the War Room, Matty has the video up on the main screen, and she nods to the team when they walk in. “I’ve consulted with Oversight. She’s informed me that we will be acting on the intel Ms. Mallory has provided.” The layer of formality is clearly designed to make sure anyone who ever finds the recorded briefings treats this as an impersonal case that none of them had a stake in. Jack knows the drill. “Now, I’m acquiring all the intel I can on Ben Strickler and Isabelle Adams.” 

Mac holds up his phone. “The last thing their friends and family heard from them was that they were traveling to Columbia to take part in something called the ‘No-Go Challenge’.” 

“Oh, I’ve heard of that,” Riley says. “It became a big thing in the backpacker community. Adrenaline junkies go to these dangerous countries to do even more dangerous things. Like jumping off waterfalls or swimming dangerous rapids and stuff.” She shrugs. “There were postings about it on the dark web. Still are, actually.” 

“And most of the countries they visit are ones that the US government warns citizens not to travel to, which means that when something happens, they’ve already washed their hands of it.” Desi frowns. “Yeah, it’s a stupid thing to do, but they don’t deserve to be left to their fates. They’re just kids.” Jack can feel the fury swimming under the words; the memory of going rogue to save a man that the government had written off is clearly still fresh in her mind.  _ She doesn’t like leaving people behind, or giving up. _

“So what’s the plan?” Mac asks.

“Well, the last thing we know about Ben and Isabelle’s whereabouts is that they were stopping in Bogota to begin the first leg of the South American version of the No Go challenge. So…we’re just going to have to replicate the steps they took until we find a clue to what happened to them.”

“Participants are required to sign their names at each stop,” Riley says. “When we find the one they didn’t get to, then we have an approximate location where they vanished.”

“We do the challenge just like them.” Mac says, crossing his arms. Jack can tell the idea is making him a little nervous, but he’s hiding it pretty well.  _ Yeah, kiddo, I’m with you, some of that stuff scares  _ me _ and I don’t have a fear of heights. _

Matty nods. "You, Bozer, Riley, and Desi can all pass for backpackers taking part in the challenge."

"What am I, chopped liver?" Jack asks.

"You look like you have too many years ' experience to do something that dumb, Dalton. Although I'm well aware that in your case, looks are deceiving."

"Oooh burn," Desi says with a chuckle. "But...she 's not wrong, Jack. Everything about you screams agent. Or military. Depending on what those kids got themselves into, that might only make things worse."

"For the record, I am being benched under heavy protest," Jack says sharply.

“Jack, that is duly noted. You will be coming with me to talk to the Strickler family, they’re living in San Diego so they’re the closest to our location. The rest of you, go gear up. R&D is outfitting backpacks. I hope you’re all ready for a hike.” 

* * *

Desi reaches for the Phoenix-issued backpack hanging on her locker.  _ One secret agent hiking kit ready to go. _ In addition to a canteen, food, a bedroll, a (more than normally well stocked) first aid kit, and extra clothes, there’s a sat phone, a backup set of comms, and a handgun with two extra mags.  _ Now this is camping in style. _

The bench in front of her rocks as Riley rests her foot on it to lace up one hiking boot. “Now that I know Phoenix stocks rugged-built, sat-uplinked tablets small enough to hide in these backpacks I am never going camping without one again,” She chuckles.

“See, now, the whole appeal of getting out of the city for me is being able to leave all that behind,” Desi says. “It’s nice to feel like I’m alone. Like I don’t have to talk to anyone if I don’t want to.”

“It’s not that I’m joined at the hip to my tech…okay, maybe I am a little…but every time we have gone camping with Mac, bad things have happened.” Riley shakes her head. “I’m gonna make Jack agree that we’re not going on any more family camping trips without some way to check in and get help if things go wrong.”

“That’s gonna be a hard sell, Jack’s a real traditionalist,” Desi laughs. 

“Not after our last trip. I think he’ll be totally on board,” Riley says. “It…didn’t go very well.”

“I’m getting the feeling Mac’s more than usually accident-prone,” Desi remarks. 

Riley looks slightly offended. “It’s not his fault. I mean, okay, sometimes it kinda is. But…” She shrugs. “I’ve never been superstitious, that was always Jack’s job, but it kinda feels like the universe has it in for my little brother.” She turns away and finishes tying her shoe with a harsh yank to the laces. 

“Then I guess it’s a good thing he’s got the best family looking out for him.” Desi says, slinging her backpack over her shoulder. 

Jack catches her in the hallway outside. He’s looked tense since Matty told him he’s not tapped for the op, and Desi’s pretty sure his problem is that he won’t be able to watch Mac’s back.  _ If what Riley says it’s true and the kid’s being followed by more bad luck than a black cat, maybe he’s right to worry as much as he does. _ She has to admit she can’t blame him. Almost every op she’s gone on with Mac has seen him injured or otherwise in trouble. 

“I’m sorry about the way that went down in there,” She offers, trying to lead with defusing the tension in the air.

Jack nods. “I know why Matty made that call. But that doesn’t mean I like it.” 

Desi can understand that. She’s been on the other side of that situation more times than she cares to remember.  _ I trust Matty more than I trusted a lot of the other people calling the shots in situations like this. But I still know that it can feel incredibly unfair. _

“I’ll bring them all back, Jack.” Desi says. “I know those are your kids.”

Jack nods. “Keep an eye on Mac. He’s the most likely to do something crazy and get in over his head.” Jack sighs. “Riley and Bozer can do some insane things too, but at least they have some sense of self-preservation. Mac needs someone to remind him he’s not expendable. You watch his back for him out there. Okay?" Jack says. 

"Of course." Desi replies. "I'll get him home safe." And not just because he's Jack's kid and she owes Jack a debt for helping her she'll probably spend a lifetime working off. Mac is unlike any agent she's ever met, but he's also the  _ best _ agent she's ever met. She's gained a professional respect for his skills, and more importantly, in that clinic in Romania, she gained the tenuous beginnings of a friendship. Mac isn't just a job now, and while that can be a dangerous thing, she's finding the rewards of being close to the people she works with are outweighing the risks. And she doesn't let people hurt her friends. 

* * *

EN ROUTE TO BOGATA

THEY’RE DRIVING…WHICH MIGHT BE CHEATING?

Mac can’t get the worried family in that video out of his head.  _ They’re terrified that they might never see their child again. _ He can’t help but wonder if his little family seemed that frightened, that lost, when he disappeared last year. 

“I did some pretty weird stuff in college myself,” Desi says, probably more to break the long and uncomfortable silence than anything else. “There was a group of us that went and raced our dirt bikes almost every weekend, I totally wrecked a snowmobile my junior year and got eighteen stitches in my leg, and I got my first three tattoos.” Desi shrugs. “Then I got out and joined the CIA.”

“It’s not too hard for me to imagine why they’d do something like this, either,” Mac says, picking at a spot on the dashboard where the plastic is curling away from itself.  _ Never got to finish that conversation at the clinic. Might as well make some headway on this drive. _ “I…um…when I was their age I was a vigilante.”

He glances at Desi to gauge her reaction. It’s not as much shock as it is simple acceptance.  _ Very likely she already knew; it’s not like my past isn’t splashed all over old papers.  _

He doesn’t give her the origin story, that’s Bozer’s to tell when he’s ready for Desi to hear it. “The cartels had cops in their pockets, and there was just too much violence anyway. I could work faster, without the red tape. I told myself that was the only reason I did it, but the truth is…it was a thrill, too. Racing all over the city, staying one step ahead of the cartels and the police…” He shrugs, glancing out the window. “I really felt…alive.” He doesn’t tell her the rest. Doesn’t tell her that it was his own little act of rebellion against the father who ran away but still left pieces of himself curled around Mac’s heart like poisonous, thorny vines. 

_ I knew he had big plans for me. That he wanted me to be smart, to use all the science he taught me. But I knew, or thought I knew, he wanted me to use it in a more traditional way. _

Parkour was mostly physics and geometry. But it was also use of something James had never really cared to teach him; physical skill. He’d always said that if Mac had to resort to physicality to win a fight, he was failing. That he should be able to use his brain to solve his problems, not his fists.  _ Whenever he told me to stand up for myself and fight back against bullies, I knew he meant to outthink them.  _

Desi doesn’t say anything, and Mac feels the need to fill the awkward silence with  _ something. _

“I don’t regret it, really. I regret how it ended, but I’m glad I did what I did. A lot of monsters are behind bars because of it.”  _ And then I ended up right there with them, in the middle of all their grudges. _ “And I learned that I was stronger than I thought I was. That I could do something and could make a difference. And I liked the feeling of living on the edge. Of breaking the rules for the right reasons and getting away with it.” It’s why he didn’t leave Phoenix when his conviction was overturned and he had the chance to start over.  _ I like this life. Because it’s kind of the same. _ He’s never been one to follow the rules. About anything. 

“I’m just surprised you didn’t make yourself web shooters and swing around the city like Spiderman,” Desi chuckles. 

“Actually, high-tensile-strength webbing like that would be almost impossible to replicate. You’d need far more liquid base than could be stored in those arm gauntlets…” Mac trails off. “You didn’t really want me to science the fun out of Spiderman, did you.” 

“Jack said you’re a real killjoy to watch movies with.” Desi grins. “I always critique the femme fatales who fight in high heels and slinky dresses.” 

Mac chuckles. “We should gang up on Jack sometime.”

“I like this plan.” Desi navigates them expertly around a switchback, avoiding a man and his pack mule on the side of the road. “I get the whole adrenaline thing though. As soon as I learned to drive, I wanted to go as fast as I could, and drive just like I saw in the movies. It looked like fun.” She smiles. “I was part of a search and rescue team for a while, and that scratched some of the danger itch, but I wanted more. So I joined Homeland Security and then the CIA.” She bites her lip. “I never feel more alive than when I’m an inch from dying. And I guess I figured better a person like that taking the risks than someone else. I’m never gonna be the one to settle down and have a family. It’s not who I am. So this is the best kind of life for me.” 

Mac nods. He knows the feeling.  _ Jack is lucky, to have gotten a second chance with Diane. _ He knows Riley is trying with Billy, but Bozer’s already found out the hard way that this life is hard on relationships. Mac feels like the outsider because he isn’t even trying. He knows they all understand why, but it’s just another reason he’s the one always trying to be the first to throw himself headlong into danger.  _ I don’t have a shot at a normal future like they might.  _

He wonders if this is the time to say it. To just get the cold hard truth out in the air. But it feels like the words are strangling themselves in his throat. He reaches into his messenger bag and pulls something out for his fingers to fuss with. The first thing they encounter is the little project he’d been working on all morning. 

"What's that?" Desi asks.

"It 's not perfect but…” Mac holds up a small object made from the top of a tin can and a nail. "You were talking about how you can 't make coffee at work the way you like it, so I looked up Vietnamese coffee presses and did my best to make one." He holds it up and twirls it around, grinning a little. "Could have just bought one, but where's the fun in that?” Some of the tension in his chest has eased. He started a conversation about his past. He doesn’t have to finish it all right now.

"That is possibly the most thoughtful thing someone has ever done for me. Aside from that time Jack made me a Bob Seger mixtape."

“Jack made mixtapes?" Mac asks.

"Oh yeah. You must have missed out on that phase." She laughs. "He knew my car only played cassette tapes, so he made one of the songs I'd let slip were my favorites, or ones he caught me singing along to on stakeouts."

"Jack let you pick the music for stakeouts?" Mac asks.

"That 's what that whole 'I took out more guys than you' started as," Desi says. "Winner got to choose the music."

"I feel like I missed a very vital piece of information about my dad," Mac chuckles, leaning on the window. "It feels…normal. To be talking to one of my dad’s friends and hear all the weird and potentially embarrassing stories."

"Oh I have better ones," Desi says. "Open the back window, Riley probably doesn't want to miss these.”

“Hey, guys, what’s going on?” Riley asks. “Did Matty send an update?”

“Nope, Desi’s telling Jack stories. Didn’t think you wanted to miss them.”

“Oh I definitely do not,” Riley says, scooting up a little closer to the front of the truck. 

“So there was this time in Tangiers,” Desi says, without breaking concentration on the road. “I convinced Jack we should ride camels. He’d ridden a horse before, he wouldn’t shut up about how good he was at it. And of course he wasn’t going to say he wasn’t confident about a camel. I wish we’d been able to get a video. He was  _ freaking out. _ ” Desi laughs. “It got up, and he almost got thrown off, and then he started yelling that we needed to get him off this thing, and he didn’t know how to make it stop, and yelling was making the camel totally freak.” She shakes her head. “He hates camels now.”

“So  _ that’s  _ why he quotes that  _ Indiana Jones _ line every time we so much as see one,” Riley says. “I wish you’d gotten video too, that would have been  _ so _ worth seeing.”

“Oh I have one video you’re gonna love,” Desi says. “Jack and his Navy buddy Steve got drunk at his place in Hawaii after a joint op, and Steve dared Jack to do one of those traditional dances. Grass skirt and all.” 

"He did what?" Riley asks, doubled over with laughter in the back of the truck. "Oh he is so not going to hear the end of this."

* * *

THIS HOUSE FEELS HAUNTED

Jack will never get used to walking into places that are missing a member of the family. He’s given all too many families the worst news, and while at the moment he doesn’t have to deliver that crushing blow to the Strickler family, he can feel the subdued emptiness of rooms that ought to have one more person, if not in them, at least potentially able to walk through the door at any moment.  _ It’s one kind of emptiness to have them simply not in the house at the moment. It’s something else entirely to think that they can’t come back.  _

Matty introduces them, making it very clear that under no circumstances will the family ever be able to reveal what agency is working to bring back their son. Jack is fairly sure as long as they bring back Ben and Isabelle, the families will be grateful enough to keep the reasons behind it a secret. 

Ben’s father holds out a hand as soon as Matty’s finished speaking. “I’m Kyle Strickler, this is my wife Stephanie.” Both of them look like they’ve been crying. “Can we offer you some coffee?”

“No, thanks,” Jack says. Matty shakes her head, and they all walk into the living room to sit down.

“Forgive us for having some concerns,” Stephanie says. “You say you’re with a government agency no one can talk about, and when I looked it up on the internet all I can see is a think tank. I would like to know exactly who is out there looking for our boy.”

Jack doesn’t blame her. They don’t want to exchange one set of kidnappers for another. He’d be skeptical of anyone offering to help Mac. 

" _ My _ son is on the team working to bring Ben and Isabelle home," Jack says. 

"Your son?" Stephanie asks.

"Yeah." Jack pulls out his phone and shows them a picture of him and Mac, working on the GTO. Both of them grimy and smeared with grease, but grinning. "This is Mac. And then Riley, my daughter, is down there too." He flips to a picture of the two of them at the fire pit at Mac's. "I know both of them are going to do whatever it takes to bring your son and his girlfriend home." 

"He was going to be a biotech engineer," Kyle says, glancing at a picture of Ben in his graduation cap and gown. "He said he was going to take a gap year, travel the world with Izzy before he got trapped behind a desk." He smiles fondly. “He was always so adventurous.” There’s another picture of Ben on the table, he’s grinning widely despite a thick blue cast on his arm. “He broke his arm the summer he was twelve, fell out of the big oak in the backyard. I was so scared, I wanted to cut the damn tree down, but Steph convinced me to build him a treehouse instead, with a ladder.” He shakes his head. “Maybe I was too protective of him. Maybe that’s why this is happening now. Why he took such a dangerous risk.” 

Stephanie sighs, picking up a photo of Ben splashing in a child’s pool, a gap-toothed grin on his face and a pair of fish-shaped water wings on his arms. “He was always so enthusiastic, but still, I can't believe he'd do something like this."

"They're kids. They're gonna make mistakes." All Jack can see is the first time he met Mac, when the kid was cuffed to a table behind bars. Or Riley, all dark eyeliner and attitude to hide the hurt little girl inside. "We all make our share of them. Our kids need us to be there for them and love them no matter what it is they messed up."

"It's hard to watch them go off on their own," Kyle says. 

"It is." Jack thinks of his conversation with Desi.  _ I know Mac is in safe and capable hands out there, but the only hands I want to trust him in are mine.  _

* * *

“Well, this is where they said to start,” Riley says. She stares up at the half-finished building in front of them, and Bozer follows her eyes. “Looks like this place was abandoned when the builders got implicated in government corruption a few years back. According to the dark web, the map we need should be on the thirty-seventh floor.”

“You don’t suppose they at least finished the elevator before they abandoned the place, do you?” Bozer asks. 

“I doubt it.” Desi pulls her backpack a little more firmly onto her shoulders. “Come on, Bozer, the exercise is good for you. You said you were trying to be healthier.” 

“Says the woman who eats the sugariest donuts known to man.” Bozer shakes his head. 

“That’s so I have the  _ energy  _ to do this stuff.” She chuckles. 

Bozer shakes his head and follows the others to the building.  _ She reminds me of Jack a lot sometimes. _ He didn’t expect to like Desi that much, she was so cold and reserved when she started with the Phoenix, and Mac seemed skittish around her, which did not improve Bozer’s opinion at all. 

But it seems like Mac’s warming up to her, in fact, if Bozer’s not wrong, he heard something about Mac’s vigilante past being shared in the truck earlier.  _ It wasn’t like I was trying to listen in, and Riley smacked me when I leaned too close to the cab, but…I haven’t seen Mac let anyone in this fast since he first met Jack and Riley.  _

It looks like Mac’s actually managed to make a friend in Desi. Bozer’s glad; Mac doesn’t exactly have a large social circle. Having a past with a terrorism conviction and a supermax cell hanging over it tends to leave Mac as a social outcast with normal people. Besides, the job doesn’t leave a lot of time for getting to know people outside of it. Mac has his friends in the lab at Phoenix, like Jill, and he stays in touch with the Penas and the Lawsons, but Bozer can tell he needs people to talk to he feels like he can be really open with.  _ He’s still skittish around Jill after the bomb in her car, and of course he can’t tell civilians about his real job.  _

For all that she insisted she didn’t want to get attached to her co-workers, Desi’s been more than happy to hang out at the house whenever she’s been invited. Bozer gets the sense she doesn’t have much of an outside social life either. He can imagine she doesn’t trust easily, after years of undercovers.

The thought makes his heart clench.  _ Leanna chose a life like that. _ He wonders if that means he’s lost her for good.  _ Will she ever really come home?  _

He’s so lost in thought he almost misses the team getting off on their floor. Riley grabs his arm and pulls him through the door off the landing just as he’s starting to step onto the next flight of stairs.

“Whoa, Boze, we’re there. I thought you were the one complaining about climbing these!” She shakes her head. “Figured you’d be counting the floors. My calves have been killing me since the eighteenth.” 

They step out into what is surprisingly a room full of people.  _ Thought this building was condemned and abandoned.  _

“Who are these people?” Bozer asks.

“Squatters,” Mac says. “Homeless people who moved in and made this their home. They make do with what they have.” He ducks under a laundry line, pushing a handful of worn shirts aside. On the other side, a small girl with chapped hands is dunking clothes in a tub of grimy water. Bozer can’t imagine dragging enough water to fill a washtub up those flights of steps. It must be hard enough just to get drinking water. It takes real dedication to clean clothes. 

Mac bends down beside the girl, who’s trying to attach another shirt to the line with a wooden clothespin (the old-fashioned kind Bozer’s rarely seen, the ones with a ‘head’ and ‘legs’) that’s split almost in half. It keeps loosening, letting the shirt it’s holding trail onto the ground, a sleeve dragging in the grime on the floor.

“Can I help you?” Mac asks in Spanish, and the girl looks at him with wide, scared eyes. 

_ She has no reason to trust someone like him. I’m sure she’s heard stories of people who snatch kids like her.  _ She doesn’t know that Mac is the last person to do something like that. 

Mac picks up the clothespin and pulls a paperclip out of his pocket. He unbends it, then starts wrapping the wire around the splitting top of the pin. The girl watches, amazed, as he lifts the edge of the shirt and pins it back to the line. He smiles at her and pulls out a handful of paperclips, setting them on the upturned bucket she was standing on to reach the high ends of the line. “Now you can fix any more.” 

She gives him a wide smile with stained and chipped teeth, and Bozer glances at Riley.  _ I wish we could help all of them. I wish there was more we could do. _

He turns around, but not soon enough to miss Desi kneeling beside the girl, glancing at a couple of thugs leaning on a wall, smoking and whistling at a young woman walking past with a basket of food, and pull a knife out of her boot, then unfasten the sheath around her leg and hand them both over. 

“Okay, where’s this map supposed to be?” She asks, rejoining the group. 

Riley consults her tablet. “Well, the directions say it’s supposed to be in a janitor’s closet on this floor.” 

They wind their way between small spaces that people have turned into their own. Bozer thinks it’s sad how someone’s life can be reduced to a six-foot square. Then again, Mac’s was a ten-by-ten room for two years.  _ Life isn’t fair to a lot of us. _

Mac pulls open the closet, then opens a cabinet that’s much shinier and newer than anything else in here. The back of the door, when it swings back, is covered in signatures in all different colors of pen. 

“Okay, I see Ben and Isabelle’s names, but…there’s nothing else in here,” Mac says. “Where…”

“Looking for these,  _ amigos? _ ” The thugs from earlier are standing by the door, holding a handful of crumpled papers, and a knife. “It will cost you. Give us the money you have, and you can have one.”

“How bout a counteroffer?” Desi says. “You give us one of those, you get to walk away with all your teeth. And that knife.” 

“She’s not kidding,” Riley says when the men laugh. 

“Maybe we will settle for a kiss from such a pretty little thing.” One of the men reaches for Riley’s hair, and Bozer sees her rock back ready to throw him. Desi beats her to it. In seconds it’s a full on fight. Bozer feels like maybe he should do something, but Desi and Riley look like they’re enjoying themselves a little too much. Bozer gets the feeling they were waiting for an excuse to mop the floor with those guys. 

The man holding the maps goes down hard, and the papers fly out of his hand, blowing and scattering across the floor. Mac takes off after them like Mickey chasing a ball, and after a moment’s deliberation Bozer turns his back on the last few seconds of the very uneven fight and goes after Mac. 

Mac’s whipping off his belt and grabbing something hanging from the ceiling. Flypaper, Bozer realizes belatedly when some of it slaps him in the head. 

Mac’s wrapping the sticky paper around the end of the belt and chasing one of the errant maps, drifting toward the open wall ahead. Bozer watches, his stomach flipping when Mac throws himself straight toward the opening, flinging the belt out over the empty air where the map is fluttering. The map catches, but Mac’s momentum is carrying him forward…

Bozer throws  _ himself  _ down, grabbing Mac’s ankle. It’s enough to stop him precariously on the edge. He rolls over, panting, hair tangled into a wild matted mess over his wide eyes. 

“You okay?” Bozer asks. Mac reels in the map and holds it up, still shaking a little. “Come on, get away from that edge. For a minute there I thought you were laboring under the delusion you’d just made yourself working wings.” 

Mac accepts a hand back to his feet, brushing dirt off his clothes and clearly trying to calm down. Bozer sighs.  _ You’re scared of heights, what were you thinking almost throwing yourself off a building? _ Then again, Mac hasn’t been acting himself this whole mission.  _ It’s hitting home for him, missing kids about his own age, after last year.  _

Desi and Riley are leaning on the wall, Riley inspecting some bruises on her hand, Desi flipping a dangerous-looking folding knife through her fingers, swinging it around and opening and closing it while glaring daggers at the men groaning on the floor. 

“I like your knife. I’m keeping it.” Desi says.

“And here I thought only Jack used  _ Guardians of the Galaxy  _ references.” Bozer chuckles. “Mac got us a map.”

“Okay, don’t know about you, but I’m ready to get out of here.” Riley’s glancing at Mac, and Bozer’s pretty sure she can tell he’s had a scare. He looks too pale, still, and he’s shaking slightly. “Where to now?”

* * *

THE WAR ROOM

Matty frowns when she gets the message from Riley. 

“What does that mean, we have a problem?”

“Well, the No-Go challenge has four separate routes, and nothing about the signature Ben and Isabelle left indicates which route they chose. I tried to see if colors were codes, but there were too many to match to specific locations.” She sighs, and Matty can practically see the defeated slump of her shoulders in the sound. 

“We have four people. Should we split up?” Bozer asks.

“No.” Jack’s emphatic declaration bothers Matty a little, but she shares his sentiments. 

“I don’t like the idea of one person alone out there. Especially not when we could be dealing with any number of dangerous things.” She sighs. “Teams of two would be acceptable, but I’d rather have you all in the right place. Maybe we can narrow this down.”

“How?” Desi asks. “We have nothing to go on.”

“What are the destinations?” Matty asks.

“A tributary of the Amazon, a mountain in the Andes, a lake in Venezuela, and a high-voltage tower in Brazil.” 

“The tower,” Jack says suddenly. “Remember that story Ben’s parents told us about him climbing the backyard tree? I think that’s where they went.”

Matty nods. Jack’s jumping all over her briefing today, but she’s willing to let it slide a little, he’s worried about Mac. It’s the first time they’ve been separated for this long since Murdoc. He’s bound to be scared for Mac’s well-being. “I think Jack’s right. That feels like the choice Ben would make.”

“I hope you’re right, Matty,” Mac says. “Because if it’s not…”

“I know. Then we’ve wasted time those kids don’t have. So get there fast and find out, one way or the other.” 

* * *

HIGH VOLTAGE TOWER

DEFINITELY NOT A POPULAR VACATION DESTINATION

Desi can think of a lot of things she’d rather be doing on a trip to South America than climbing this metal monstrosity they’re parking beside. Not that she’s not a thrill seeker, an adrenaline junkie who has definitely done some dumb things in her career, but somehow this doesn’t have the same appeal as flying a cargo plane through a storm or throwing herself off the side of a mountain with a stolen hang glider and a dislocated shoulder. 

When they step out, Riley sets her rig down on the hood of the truck, pulling up something that she turns so they can all see. 

“According to local news, an Australian girl was found dead at the bottom of this tower two weeks ago,” Riley says. “Local officials couldn’t determine what she was doing here.”

“I’m sure if they’d looked closer, they’d have found a badly photoshopped map somewhere in her belongings,” Bozer says, frowning. “This is dangerous. Like scary dangerous. Those towers are nothing to mess with.”

“This coming from the guy who stuck a wet mop in a transformer,” Riley says, shaking her head. 

“Hey, that was because Mac told me how to do it.” Bozer shrugs. 

“This says that the next clue is going to be hidden on an insulator up there along those wires,” Riley says, shading her eyes and pointing to the top of the tower. “That’s also where the kids are supposed to sign their names at this stop.” 

"I'll go up," Desi says. "No one else has to.” She reaches for the rope in her pack, she’ll anchor herself to walk out on the insulators, that’s where the map says the next clue should be. “I took electrical engineering; I know what's up there. I know what's safe to touch and what isn't." She'll be fine. And if not…well, better her than any of the rest of them. 

Mac nods. "Still, I think I should go with you. I mean…what if something goes wrong up there? I should be there to try and fix it."

“Well, you should know what to avoid so you don’t turn us both into charcoal briquettes. I’m fine with that.” She ties the rope around her waist and hands the other end to Mac. “Might as well be a little safer on the climb too.”

She starts up the side of the tower. There’s exposed bolts that don’t seem to serve any structural purpose, and she wonders if they’re additions made by someone associated with this challenge.  _ Great. Make it easier for people to get killed.  _

She thinks she’s finally put her finger on the difference between her occasional (or really not so occasional) death-defying stunts and this challenge.  _ These kids probably don’t know the real dangers of what they’re walking into. They don’t realize how huge a risk they’re taking until they’re in the middle of it. _ Desi’s always known full well that this could be the time her luck runs out. 

"Heights are definitely not my thing," Mac mumbles from below her. He sounds like he’s starting to regret this decision. 

"You know, some schools of thought say facing your fears in controlled circumstances can help make them less paralyzing," Desi replies.

"You call this a controlled circumstance?" Mac bites back.  _ Good. Got him arguing. _ Jack gave her a few pieces of advice on Mac-handling before they left L.A. One of them was, if in a situation where Mac appears to be spiraling, say something that blatantly defies the laws of physics or anything else that Mac will feel compelled to correct. At the moment, this was the only thing she could think of.

As much as she knows Jack didn’t fit the profile for this mission, she’s beginning to think maybe they should have brought him as backup. Mac is clearly at least five times as nervous without him. 

“I mean, if we fall, it won’t be the height that kills us, it’ll be those supercharged wires.”

“Not really helping.” Mac groans. “I wonder if this is what it feels like to be Jack when I ramble about bombs.”

“Probably.” Desi hasn’t been around the team long, but she’s learned very quickly that Mac is disturbingly knowledgeable about anything that goes boom. She’s sure that’s very aggravating to anyone dealing with a situation while listening to Mac describe in detail how their death would play out. 

She’s surprised how fast she’s gotten used to Mac and his strange nerdy ways.  _ Probably helps that Jack trusts him, clearly with his own life if need be. _ She’s always considered Jack an excellent judge of character. 

But it’s not just Jack’s obvious trust that’s swayed her, Mac’s earned her respect in his own right. At moments like this, when he runs (or climbs) headlong into danger in order to protect the rest of them. Time and again she’s watched him risk life and limb for his team.  _ I can see why Jack likes him. He’s a good kid.  _

Once they reach the insulators, Desi secures the rope and starts to step out onto the ceramic disks. Mac stops her with a hand on her arm. 

“I was into parkour as a vigilante, remember? I can balance on anything.” Mac insists. “I’ll go out there.”

“Are you sure?” Five minutes ago he was practically about to have a panic attack. She isn’t sure he should be up here at all, much less walking a near-literal tightrope. “I can do it. I’m perfectly fine with it.” That might be a slight exaggeration, but she’s definitely in a better headspace than Mac. Still, Jack said telling him he’s not capable of doing something can have really bad repercussions. He didn’t tell her why, but everything about Mac has screamed that his childhood was fraught with an abusive parent.  _ Probably someone who demanded perfection from him.  _

“Yeah.” He takes a deep breath. “Just hang onto that rope.”

“You got it.” Desi says. She wraps it expertly like she’s preparing for a climb. “Belay on.” 

Mac takes two steps before she sees his legs start shaking.  _ Damn it. _ He’s never going to get anywhere at this rate. 

She clears her throat and begins singing softly.  _ “Bây giờ, là giờ Còn nằm xuốn.” _

“What’s that?” Mac asks, his voice shaking. 

“A lullaby my mother used to sing to me whenever I was afraid.” She smiles. “It always helped.” 

He smiles faintly, but it’s something. “I like it. Is there more?”

She nods. “ _ Bây giờ, là gió. Con khỏi lo. Bây giờ, là gió, con cháu đem. Bây giờ, là gió, con ngủ ngon.” _

With every word, Mac gets one step farther out on the insulators. Suddenly, he stops, and she wonders if he had another moment of panic. He’s looking down.  _ Don’t do that, it’ll make things worse. _

“I think…I can see something written on these insulators. But…it looks like most of it is on the underside.”

_ Great, as if this wasn’t already a hard enough challenge. _ Desi’s starting to think she really should have gone out there.  _ I didn’t take eight years of ballet lessons to forget how to be light on my feet and have excellent balance. _ She’d hated to discourage Mac and treat him like he was incompetent, but clearly this is far outside his comfort zone. 

“I’m gonna hold my phone under there, see if I can get a pic…” Mac bends over, pulling out his phone, but it’s too quick to shift his weight properly. He slips, and Desi tightens her grip on the rope, catching him before he can fall. The phone isn’t so lucky. It tumbles into the wires with a sizzling crackle, and then hits the ground.

“I…uh…I need another phone.” Mac’s voice is weak and hoarse. He struggles back to his feet and takes a couple steps in her direction, holding out his hand.

“Mac, just come back here. I’m going out there.” Desi shakes her head. “You did your best. I know where the writing is, I’ll go out and take a picture of it with my phone.” 

“You just…don’t want…to hand me your phone,” Mac says, a weak attempt at a joke. 

“Jack did tell me if I want it to come back from this mission you shouldn’t even know I have it.” She shrugs. 

Mac takes another step toward her, but then slides. The insulators are looser here at the top, and one shifts just enough under his feet to ruin his balance. He’s falling again, and this time Desi wasn’t paying enough attention, there’s too much slack…

She grabs the rope, wincing as it cuts into her palm, and stops Mac’s free-fall before he gets any more dangerously close to those wires. 

“I can’t pull you up,” She says after a moment, when Mac has stopped gasping and is simply clinging to the rope in a death grip. “I can’t let go long enough to get a better grip or you’re going to fall into the wires.”

He nods. 

“Just get far enough up to grab onto that exposed bolt near your head, use that to support your weight, and then I can reach down and pull you up.” He nods, painstakingly pulling himself up hand over hand until he reaches the bolt, then reaching out and gripping it with his right hand, fingers white-knuckled.

"I got you." Desi says, leaning down, letting go of the rope, and reaching out. "Take my hand."

Mac nods, but it looks like a massive effort to force his fingers free of the rope. She clasps her hand around his, locking her grip around Mac's wrist. Her palm burns where the rope damaged it, but she ignores the ache, hoping no blood is going to slick her grip and send Mac plummeting to his death. She pulls upward, and he pushes off from the side of the tower, helping her tug him back to safety. 

Mac steps back onto the side of the tower with her, and she sighs, leaning her head back against the metal, listening to the faint hum of the current that’s resonating through the structure. Mac is panting, trembling. 

“You think you can keep me from falling out there?” She asks.

He nods shakily. 

“Okay, here, let me just get the line reworked.” She ties and unties connections until Mac is set up to be the one belaying her. He’s still vibrating with shock and adrenaline, but she knows he’ll refuse to climb down until they get what they came for. 

She steps out onto the insulators, her muscle memory finding its balance as her feet move carefully over the edges of the disks.  _ Just like your eighth grade recital. But with slightly higher stakes.  _

She finds the insulators with the writing without a problem, and reaching under with her phone while maintaining her balance on the wire is barely an issue.  _ I should have just come out here in the first place. _ Next time she’s going to trust her gut and not overthink whether she’ll hurt Mac’s feelings telling him to stand down.  _ Pretty sure ‘let him almost kill himself trying to prove he can do something’ is not what Jack had in mind when he told me to go easy on him. _

She sends the photos to Riley immediately, just in case, then walks back to Mac. “Okay, I got it. Ready to get down?”

Mac closes his eyes and leans back. “I don’t know if I can.” 

“It’s gonna be alright. You’ve got this. We’ll stay on the rope, I’ll stay above you. If you fall, I’ve got you.” She rests a hand gently on his shoulder the way she’s seen Jack do to reassure him. “I’ve got you.” 

* * *

Mac tries to tune out the blood rushing in his ears and focus on Desi’s voice. She’s singing again as they climb down. He has no idea what the words are, he’s pretty sure he needs to start learning Vietnamese, like Jack clearly did.  _ They can use that to talk and no one else knows what they’re saying.  _ He can’t be sure Desi hasn’t interchanged the words to the lullaby and is complaining about stupid overconfident partners who turn out to be afraid of heights, but setting it to music.

_ She’d be right to be upset, if she was. I could have ruined the whole op. _ He thought he could do it, he thought he’d be fine, but he definitely wasn’t, and if not for Desi’s quick thinking, he’d be dead.  _ I should know better than to push myself like that.  _ He doesn’t even know who he was trying to prove something to. The easy answer is Desi, but he thinks this was more about trying to tell  _ himself _ that he wasn’t afraid. And instead, he almost got himself killed. 

But he did prove one thing, with all his stupid risk-taking. He trusted Desi. To keep him from falling, to pull him back. Desi isn’t Jack, but she  _ is _ a friend. Someone he just realized he can count on to have his back. Even when he does incredibly dumb things he should have known better than to even try. She hasn’t judged him for overestimating his ability, (at least not that he knows of, she could be cursing him out in Vietnamese right now, but still, she knows he wouldn’t know), she didn’t scold or tell him that he should have just let her go (unless she’s planning on doing it when they’re safely on solid ground). 

But even when they’re off the tower and off the ropes, Desi says nothing about what happened. Bozer fusses, apparently he was too scared to watch but still asked Riley to tell him everything that happened, and Riley has Mac’s ruined phone. She’s insisting she’s going to show Jack solid proof that Mac can and will destroy his own phones too, but Mac can hear the tremor in her voice. Like Jack, she’s making a joke to cover the fact that she was scared witless a few minutes ago. 

Mac decides the best part of wisdom is to apologize to everyone before he gets chewed out for this particular brand of dumb. “I’m sorry. I should have known better than to think I was the one to go out there.”

“It’s fine. We’re all back safely on the ground, and we got what we came for,” Desi says. “But in the future let’s leave the high-wire acts to me, okay?”

“Ok.”

“Thankfully your death-defying stunt paid off. I’ve got Ben and Isabelle’s names,” Riley says. “And a name of a now defunct soccer team that led me to an abandoned stadium. Guess that’s the next step in the challenge.”

“That seems like a big change from a high-voltage tower,” Bozer says as they all pile back into the truck. “Why is sneaking into an old soccer stadium such a risk?”

“I don’t know. I guess we’ll find out,” Riley says. 

“I’m with Bozer. I have a bad feeling about this next stop,” Desi says. “Can’t put my finger on why, but something about this seems off to me.” She stops with her hand on the key and pulls out her phone, flipping through the pictures. “There.” She expands the image, and Mac glances at the photo of the insulator with the soccer team’s name scrawled on in Sharpie. 

“I think I know why.” Mac’s brain is finally coming online enough to function. “I think your gut feeling is spot on.” He takes the phone and turns up the brightness.  _ How does she function with this thing on the lowest possible setting? _ “This part of the insulator is clean.”

“So, it’s the underside. The birds are all pooping on the top.” Riley shrugs.

Mac zooms the photo out slightly. “But the section where the clue is written is even cleaner than the rest of this disk. And the Sharpie is newer than some of the names written on the signature one.” 

“So, someone comes out and refreshes the stopping points every so often?” Bozer asks.

“Someone changed this one.” Mac zooms in again. “They tried to scrub off the old instructions, but the Sharpie had permeated the ceramic a little. See these blue smudges?” He points to the edges of some of the letters. “That’s all that’s left of the original location.” 

Desi frowns. “So either the people who set this challenge up changed their destination for some reason…”

“Or we’re walking right into a trap that’s been very cleverly set up.” Mac hands Desi back her phone and settles back into the seat as she puts the truck in drive. 

They’re about two hours from the stadium. Mac pulls a couple paperclips out of his pocket and starts bending them, into the shape of the lightning bolts on the high voltage warning signs back at the tower. 

Somehow, working up the nerve to tell Desi the truth is even harder than convincing himself to walk out on that wire.  _ And there’s the real reason I did it. To prove I can make myself do something I really don’t want to do. _ He was sort of hoping his brain would skip over that part. As much as he can plan, as much as he knows what he  _ needs  _ to do, actually doing it is the part that’s hard. He can plan the whole conversation in his head, just like he could think through every step it would take to get him from the tower to those signed disks, but actually putting his feet on the wire was a totally different thing. The same will be true as soon as the words start coming out of his mouth. But at least he’s pretty sure that if he makes a fool of himself again, Desi still won’t judge him. 

“You know how I said I regretted how being a vigilante ended?” Mac says, twisting the paperclip so hard he’s worried the metal might snap. 

Desi nods.

“I went to prison for two years before Jack and Riley recruited me. The police thought I killed someone…and at the time I did too.” He swallows hard. It’s still difficult to accept the truth that what happened to Ramsay wasn’t his fault. That he isn’t to blame. “I got caught on a camera leaving the cartel warehouse I blew up that time, but even if I hadn’t, I’d have turned myself in, couldn’t live with the thought a family lost a father thanks to me.”

Desi flinches. He wonders if he accidentally dredged up something from  _ her _ past she’d like to forget. She doesn’t talk about what she did as a UC agent, but Mac knows it’s not always pretty. He remembers what Jack and Matty said about Ethan when they were looking for him.  _ You do things you would never want to, because it’s what you have to do to survive, and justify it in the name of a greater good.  _ Given some of the things Desi’s said, she got dropped into several of the worst criminal organizations on the planet. He can’t imagine how she survived, much less earned their trust. 

He’s already trying to find a way to relive his past with as little pain as possible. He doesn’t want to force Desi back into hers. He stops talking, dropping the paperclip on the dashboard. 

He’ll tell her later. When they don’t need to focus on a mission. When she can get mad at him and storm off if she needs to. He’d rather not endure the rest of this op with her giving him the cold shoulder. 

When they reach the stadium, it looks deceptively safe. It’s a matter of a few minutes to sneak under the sagging wire fence with its ‘Keep Out’ signs in duplicate Portuguese and Spanish, and to find their way into the seating section. 

There’s no indication where the next clue is going to be, which is setting Mac even more on edge. If he wasn’t convinced by now that this is a trick, funneling the kids in here to take them at an unmonitored location, he is now.  _ Up until now, the clues for the challenge have explained where to find the next ones. All this did was tell us where we needed to go. _

“Split into teams of two,” Matty’s voice comes in over comms. “A group of four might make whoever this is skittish.”

“I’ll go with Desi and wander around the east side if you and Bozer want to take the west,” Mac says. He’s still sort of hoping to get the conversation over with. The longer he puts it off, the bigger the knot in his stomach is getting. He’s starting to feel sick. 

But Desi is the first one to speak. She switches her comm off and picks up a discarded team flag, twisting the faded, ragged material between her fingers. Mac shuts his off as well. If she doesn’t want the rest of the team to hear whatever’s coming, he can respect that. 

“What happened at the tower, that was my fault,” she says. “I got distracted and I let the rope go loose. You wouldn’t have fallen if I’d been doing my job.”

“It’s fine. I did the really dumb thing. Walked out there in spite of the fact that I’m absolutely terrified of heights.” He shrugs. “The important thing is, we made it.” 

“Jack wouldn’t have let that happen.”

Suddenly, Mac gets it. Jack must have given Desi the ‘bring my kid home in one piece’ spiel before they left, and she’s taking it to heart very seriously. He appreciates his dad’s protective streak, but also Jack was probably harsher than he would have been if they hadn’t just come off a Murdoc scare. And those smugglers. 

“I think Jack thinks I’m still a kid sometimes,” Mac says. “Don’t get me wrong, I don’t actually mind the whole helicopter parent thing…but he does tend to get a little less than rational where I’m concerned. You don’t have to be him.” He tries to force a chuckle. “I think the world can only handle one Jack Dalton.” 

Desi’s phone buzzes, and she pulls it out, then grimaces. “Matty’s giving me the riot act for shutting off comms and she wants you to turn yours back on too.”

Mac does, quickly. “Sorry, Matty,” he apologizes immediately. 

“You have incoming. Large van, blacked out windows, stopping outside the stadium.” Matty’s voice has the ‘we are going to have a discussion about mission protocols later’ sound to it, but Mac can tell right now she’s more concerned about making sure her team is alive to have that discussion. 

“Yeah, Matty, I got that on my tablet now,” Riley says. “We’ve got four men getting out, black ski masks. This is our guys. They probably made sure to leave vague directions on purpose, make the kids wander around this place looking for a clue and give them time to get here and make their move.”

Matty’s voice takes on a colder tone, the one Mac’s learned to recognize as her stepping back and taking a look at the tactical positions of an operation. Her ‘big picture’ voice. "Okay. These guys are most likely middle men. Which means if we take them now, we might not get anything useful. I'm sorry to ask this, but...you guys need to play along, when and if they find you. Just for a little while, until they get you to wherever they 're likely holding the rest of the kids."

"Matty," Jack 's voice is warning. "Not a good plan. We don't know what they take those kids for. They could be cannibals."

"Jack, I  _ highly _ doubt that. And Mac and Desi are trained agents, as are Bozer and Riley. Whoever they take, they won't know who they're up against."

"I still don't like it."

Neither does Mac. He thinks he knows, now, what's happening to all of those kids, and he wants to plead with Matty to stop, not to make him do this.  _ But if I back out, then Ben and Isabelle and God knows how many other kids are going to suffer, just the way I did. _

"Jack, I can do it. Stand down, Matty's right. This is the plan."

Desi rolls her eyes, but starts removing her weapons, tucking them under a seat. “Riley, Bozer, if they get us and not you, I left my gear under seat 285.” Mac can hear the sound of Riley presumably ditching her own gun, knives, and tablet. 

“Comms too?” Bozer asks.

“No, that’s how we’re going to track you,” Matty says. “Remember, these people don’t know you’re government agents. They won’t be searching you like they would if you weren’t undercover.”  _ They’re going to think they’re getting college kids on a backpacking trip, which is exactly what we’re gonna give them.  _

“They’re going in the east entrance. Mac, Desi, they’re coming for you.” Matty’s voice is tense, before the sound in the comms cuts off. Mac thinks he heard Jack saying something, pretty loudly too.  _ He’s going to be pissed. _

Mac pretends to go back to looking for a clue. He has to act like they’re being taken by surprise. Beside him, Desi does the same. 

When he hears footsteps on the bleachers, he stands up sharply, acting startled. Or at least hoping that’s how it comes off. “Hey, what…” One of the men on his side steps forward and grabs for his arms. 

They have to put up some level of a struggle, otherwise they’ll definitely raise suspicion. Mac kicks and scuffles, and he can see Desi trying to hold back her instinctive reaction. If she was actually fighting, Mac has no doubt all four of these guys would already be on the ground. But they can’t  _ do  _ that. It feels like prison all over again, in a sick way. Knowing that putting up a fight is the wrong move. That the best option now is giving in. 

Someone shoves something against his side, there’s the unfortunately too-familiar feel of a taser crackling against his skin, and his world blacks out. 

* * *

BACK OF A CREEPY VAN

WHERE THERE’S PLENTY OF TIME TO THINK ABOUT THE IRONY OF SURVIVING A HIGH VOLTAGE TOWER ONLY TO GET TASED 

There’s no  _ good _ kind of unconsciousness to wake up from, but Desi will admit that she prefers a taser to getting drugged or knocked on the head. At least, once the buzzing twitching feeling fades out a little, she can normally think straight. 

She tugs at the ropes securing her hands. They’re really not all that tight, she could be out of here in seconds if she wanted to.  _ Of course the time I get captured by people who do a sloppy job is the time I can’t actually leave. _

The van turns a corner, and she feels the thud of another body colliding with hers.  _ Mac. _ Last she saw, he was going boneless in one of those meatheads’ arms. Probably another taser. She hears a faint gasp from his direction, and then a weak shuffling movement, and there’s no longer any contact of his body against hers.

Their comms have been cut off, she can’t hear Phoenix command on the other end. She’d guess that’s because Jack and Matty are having an epic throwdown in the War Room right now. That’s what it sounded like before she got tasered. Phoenix can hopefully still hear  _ them _ , but Matty probably decided hearing the parents fight would distract Mac and Desi from mission focus. Plus, it was getting kind of loud, and Desi knows from painful experience that sometimes those sounds don’t confine themselves to the inside of the ears of the person they’re meant for. 

At least she hopes that’s the reason. Because the thought that the taser knocked their comms out and she and Mac are on their own with these guys is distinctly not reassuring. 

The van takes another corner, a lot faster, and Desi is rolled painfully into a wall, then back around to the middle of the vehicle. This time it feels like she’s probably facing Mac, she can feel warm breath on her face. She blinks a few times, and the dim interior of the vehicle finally begins to take on form, courtesy of a small amount of light slipping past the window coverings and what seems to be a curtain separating the back of the van from the driver’s area.  _ Most likely also some kind of barrier to keep the cargo from causing trouble.  _ Mac is huddled up, across from her, knees pulled to his chest. His hands are moving across the floor, she can hear fingernails scratching the threadbare carpeting.

For a moment, her comms go live, and Riley’s voice comes through in a whisper. “I got a plate trace on that van. It’s one of several creepy vans registered to one Derek Diresta. He’s flagged in the Phoenix database, he owns what appears to be a legitimate import-export business, but lately we’ve been getting intel that suggests he’s using it as a cover to run a human trafficking operation.” 

It’s such a relief to realize her comms are working that she doesn’t process the weight of the information for a moment. When she does, she feels sick to her stomach, and not because she’s got her cheek pressed to a stinky van carpet or the motion sickness from being thrown around the back like a rag doll. 

_ Damn it. They’ve been funneling college kids to them with this No Go challenge, abducting them from places they can’t be traced. _ She can’t wait till they get the go ahead to give these guys hell. She needs to break some noses. She glances at Mac, wondering if he’s as pissed and ready for a good fight as she is, and freezes. 

Mac is  _ shaking. _ Not just the aftereffects of being hit with a taser, but visibly trembling with fear. He’s blinking rapidly, and his hands are quivering where they’re tucked up next to his face. He’s curling in on himself like he can make himself invisible if he’s small enough. She knows that reaction all too well. She’s seen it in dozens of people she helped pull out of traffickers’ operations, more times than she cares to recall. 

_ Oh my God. _ Desi wants to crumble, to turn into dust, because she  _ is _ lower than dirt after what she's done to him.

She should have seen it. She should have known from the moment she met him.  _ And what a terrible first meeting, no wonder he seemed afraid of me for weeks. _

She takes the risk of talking, quietly, it’s better than having him go into a panic attack on her. "Mac, we're going to get out of this. I promise you." She wraps her fingers around his. "I'm not going to let anything happen. Jack would kill me if I did."  _ And now I know why.  _ She should have known sooner. She should have known the second she saw two years in a supermax in all those articles in the newspaper.  _ I’m a fucking idiot. _

She bites her lip until blood drips down onto the filthy carpet in the van.  _ Damn it I deserve every dirty look Jack has given me since I showed up.  _ No wonder Mac's been afraid of her. Her rough ways of showing her friendship…  _ I should have known, I never saw Jack be physically affectionate like he is with the rest of the team. No back slaps, no playful roughhousing.  _ Gentle hugs and fistbumps and a hand rested almost nonexistently on an arm or shoulder, yes. 

She should have known. But she was too busy assessing Angus MacGyver as a coddled golden boy, as one of those agents who skates by on charm and good looks and the kind of charisma that makes even their failures seem successful. Like she's seen all too many times before. But it wasn't the case here.  _ All that time I'm sure he wished he had none of that. It’s probably what made him a target.  _

She can't say there are no skeletons in her closet. No things she's done in the name of a mission that take more than one beer to forget. But it's always been her choice. Her call, to make the move and do what had to be done to save the world one more time. MacGyver didn't have an option. No backup team, no plan B. 

_ “Bây giờ, là giờ Còn nằm xuốn. Bây giờ, là gió. Con khỏi lo. Bây giờ, là gió, con cháu đem. Bây giờ, là gió, con ngủ ngon.” _ She can’t sing loudly, but she can sing under her breath. She hopes it’s enough to calm Mac down, to keep his mind on what’s here and now and not what could happen to them. 

It doesn’t help a lot, but it helps a little, and that has to be good enough. She keeps singing until the van jolts to a stop, the doors open, and their masked captors drag her and Mac out into the blinding light.

They’re shoved through a door into a small building, down the steps, and into a chilly basement room that’s dimly lit with flickering fluorescents. Desi wrinkles her nose at the smell of people kept too long in one place. It’s not something she’s ever found to be a good thing. There’s a row of kids handcuffed to a thick pipe running along one wall. All of them appear college age or slightly older, and they’re in various states of disheveled. Still, she can tell already that none of them are the kids they’re looking for. 

“Hey, Derek, picked up two more at the stadium,” One of their captors says, shoving Mac and Desi forward toward a balding man who’s frowning at a tablet in his hand. “There were a couple others, but they’d bolted by the time we took care of these two. Figured we’d grab these ones first, the blond one fits what you’re being asked for.” 

Desi feels Mac cringe.  _ Unfortunately for him, they’re right.  _ Mac’s a pretty boy, which doesn’t give him any safety around people like this.  _ Objectively, we were the more valuable target.  _ Even though Riley’s attractive, Mac’s the standout. And getting him and a female victim at the same time was too good a deal for them to pass up.

“Nice work.” Diresta smiles, a creepy look of fascination that turns Desi’s stomach even though it isn’t directed at her. “Pay them, Luca.” 

One of the men who was guarding the kids grabs an envelope off the table and walks up. He looks from the ropes to Desi’s wrist, where some of her tattoos are visible under the sleeve of her jacket. “Hey, Derek. They brought us a problem.” She flinches when someone drags at the collar of her jacket, sliding it off her shoulders, showing the multitude of tattoos up and down her arms under the t-shirt sleeves. 

Diresta shakes his head. “This one’s a liability. Look at all that ink.” Desi grimaces as her arms are pulled and rolled. “Damn, she’s got more color on her than a Picasso. Gonna have to make sure she gets to someone who’s discreet. Makes her disappear.” 

Desi scowls. She knows her tats make her less valuable to these people.  _ Anyone who knows me would recognize even a glimpse of them. _ She can’t be sold on the dark web or other postings like that, it’ll have to be word of mouth. She just hopes they don’t decide it’s not worth the effort. She won’t let them just shoot her, but things could get messy, and without the rest of their backup on scene yet, she doesn’t like the odds.

She wants to grab Mac and get out of here, but with this many guns and so many untrained civilians as potential casualties, she can’t risk it.  _ Mac wouldn’t want that. _

“Better make sure this one isn’t the same thing,” Diresta says, nodding to Mac. “If you people brought me two I can’t sell…” He sighs. “All these college kids getting inked these days. It’s gonna run me outta business.” He sounds genuinely frustrated, and Desi feels sick. 

She turns away when the men start yanking Mac’s flannel off his shoulders. Clearly he’s already been put through enough humiliation in his life, she’s sure this isn’t something he wants her to see. She cringes at the memory of when she first met him, of the way Mac had pulled a towel around his shoulders like it could somehow protect him from everything in the world. 

She can hear Mac’s breathing start to speed up, shaky gasps.  _ If he doesn’t find a way to calm down he’s going to have a panic attack. _ And get himself labeled yet another liability more than likely. She looks up, meeting his eyes, trying to get him to focus on her, and not the situation.

It almost works; Mac seems to be starting to match his breathing to her own, and then the man who took his shirt steps in between them. He scowls at the long-sleeved Henley underneath Mac’s flannel, then grabs the hem of it and pulls it over Mac’s head, leaving the ends of the sleeves dangling from his arms above the ropes. 

Desi wants to stay focused on Mac’s face. But the deep reddish brown lines now visible on Mac’s chest are hard to ignore. They look ragged and messy, but also deliberately placed, a crudely carved ‘M’.  _ Who did this to him? _ And she thought getting tattoos that marked her as a member of a criminal group was bad. 

“Scar like that, you must have belonged to someone else at some point.” Diresta’s hands probe the deep lines on Mac’s chest. “Guess you’ve got some experience, huh?” He shrugs. “That’s actually been known to raise the price I can ask. People know it’s a little much to ask for unused goods these days, and someone who knows what they’re doing, well, that can be a real asset.” 

Mac shudders. “Maybe you’ll even make enough to make up for the fact that I have to ditch the girl.”

Desi flinches.  _ I thought they decided I was just going to be a little more work.  _

“I can’t move her quickly or quietly. She’s gonna be just as much trouble as those two who got their faces splashed all over the news. Put her with them. Damn shame to lose three on one run, but better than one of ‘em getting us all caught.”

“No!” Desi shouts, and struggles frantically as two of the men start to pull her away. She’s glad it can be passed off as fear of what’s going to happen to her.  _ Don’t separate us. _ Mac is two seconds from having a breakdown, she can see it in his eyes.

She fights all the way up the stairs until one of the men jabs her with the taser again. 

When she comes to, she’s laying on the filthy floor of a van again, and two kids’ faces are staring at her from the side. Despite the grime, and the gags obscuring the lower half of their faces, she recognizes Ben and Isabelle.

She rolls over slowly, groaning, taking stock of the situation.  _ There’s one driver, maybe a second passenger and three of us. If I can just get free… _ She has to get out of this and get back to Mac. If something happens to him, Jack will kill her. 

Ben and Isabelle’s eyes widen as Desi tugs out the knots in her bonds with her teeth. She raises a finger to her lips for silence, even though it’s hardly necessary, since they’re both gagged. 

She leans in closer so she can whisper, and at the same time pull a barely visible bobby pin out of Isabelle’s straggling bun. “Listen, I can get us out of this, but I need your help. I’ve got a plan.”

* * *

MAC REALLY HATES BEING STUCK IN UNDERGROUND ROOMS WITH CREEPY PEOPLE

Derek Diresta isn’t Murdoc, but he might as well be. Mac shivers, more from the eyes on him than the chilly air in the room. He knows the tied-up kids can’t see his chest, not yet anyway, but his back is a mess too, after his last encounter with Murdoc.  _ Let’s face it.  _ I’m _ a mess. _

“Now that your little girlfriend is out of the picture, I think you can see that it will be to your advantage to avoid causing me any trouble.” Diresta frowns, glaring at Mac. 

_ Please, someone, hurry. _ Mac knows Riley and Bozer are tracking his comm signal, they should be here by now. It feels like it’s been hours since the van dropped them here. It’s hard to keep track of time when every second is ticking down to a terrible eventuality. 

He shivers, unable to look anywhere but the floor. He doesn’t want to look at his captors, but he can’t bear to meet the pitying looks of the kidnapped kids either.  _ I should know better than to try and hide my past. That always just blows up in my face. _ Now Desi knows, and so do a bunch of random people. He probably won’t ever see  _ them _ again, but he has to face Desi every day at work and know she knows. 

_ I was going to tell her, so this didn’t happen. _ Now she’s going to think he was trying to lie to her on purpose. He can’t decide if it will be worse if she’s angry at him, or if she pities him. He glances at the scar on his chest and looks quickly away, he hates it.  _ Why did he do this to me? _ Murdoc is sitting in a black site, but that won’t make everything he’s done to Mac magically disappear. It feels like a cheap victory.  _ He still gets to gloat, and he’s still ruining my life. _

_ Jack is never going to let me go anywhere without him ever again. _ Mac already knows he’s going to be in for yet another round of intense helicopter parenting. But it’s better to think about that than what happens in the meantime.  _ Eventually it will be over and I’ll get to go home. _ He feels awful for the other kids here, who haven’t been able to hope for the same thing. They can’t be sure anyone is coming, as a matter of fact, it’s basically the opposite.  _ They know they’re in places no one will go into to save them. _ He knows how horrible and hopeless that feeling is, and he wants Riley and Bozer to get here, as much for those kids as for him.  _ It’s not the kind of feeling I want anyone else to ever have. _

“Put him with the others, looks like he’s at least a keeper,” Diresta says, nodding to the man holding Mac’s wrists. 

“Maybe we should find out just how much experience he has,” One of the men suggests. Mac tries to slow his breathing, tries to get everything back under control. But he can’t. He can’t calm down, he can’t stop panicking. They’re going to do this and no one is here to save him and if he fights back they might threaten the other kids. He swallows and blinks away tears and tries to push everything away for now.  _ Do what you have to do to protect these people.  _

He closes his eyes and lowers his head and hopes they get it over with quickly. 

* * *

Riley tries to focus on the road and the signals on her tablet, and not Jack’s argument with Matty in the background. 

“Damn it Matty, you know what they’re gonna do to him and Des.”

“No, Jack, we  _ don’t  _ know. Diresta is a middle man, he’ll probably just put them with the other kids until he finds a buyer. Did you want me to tell Mac that he’s not capable of running this kind of op? Do you want him to think that all we see is how damaged he is?” 

Riley can’t decide whose side she’s on. Her heart is with Jack, saying Mac shouldn’t be traumatized again. Especially not so soon after Murdoc. She can’t imagine what it’s like for him, to have to sit there and not fight back. To pretend he doesn’t know what’s happening. 

But she can appreciate Matty’s position. Mac insisted on going back to field work. Knowing full well what it might come to. To tell him he can’t do this, to act like his past is a liability, might just hurt him in a different way.  _ Find him, fast, and you won’t have to worry about either. _

Bozer curses when a slow-moving vehicle cuts them off, forcing him to hit the brakes and drop their speed considerably. “Damn it, get out of the way!”

“What is going on out there?” Jack shouts. 

Riley tries to tune it out, but what’s coming through from Mac and Desi isn’t better. They’ve reached the drop location, and it sounds like things aren’t improving. She shakes her head, wondering if she should just mute comms for a minute so she can focus on giving Bozer directions. 

Matty beats her to it. “Jack, the best thing you can do for Mac right now is  _ shut up _ so that Riley and Bozer can work, and listen to comms. We’re still hearing what’s happening in there.”

“Yeah, and none of it is good, Matty. They’re concerned about Desi.”

“Of course they are, Jack, she’s got a hundred different tattoos.” Matty says. “I’m sure this is not the first time Agent Nguyen has been in a situation like this. She’s good at convincing people she’s valuable to them.” 

“She might be fine, but listen, Matty, Mac’s about to have a damn panic attack, and I’m not there!” Jack’s voice is about one decibel below ear-splitting. “This was a shit plan, Matty. I don’t care if he agreed to it or not, he agreed to  _ Bishop, _ damn it.” 

Riley swallows. She hates every single memory of that op.  _ Don’t think about it. Don’t go there.  _

“Okay, Bozer, this is the location.” She says, and he hits the brakes. They’re about twenty yards from a fenced area with a house and a barn. Riley can see a tall gate with a makeshift guard post. 

“Don’t suppose you know the password?” Bozer asks.

“No, I was kind of thinking we do this Dread Pirate Roberts style.” Riley reaches into the back of the vehicle. “Now, I don’t have a holocaust cloak, but I figure we dump some of this coolant on the engine, we get a nice cloud of smoke going, and a great little diversion.”

A van roars by as they’re climbing out, and both of them dive into the weedy ditch to avoid being seen, but it doesn’t seem like the driver even noticed them. Riley breathes a sigh of relief, stands up, and pops the hood. 

A few moments later they pull around the bend in the road into view of the guard station, smoke billowing from under the hood. Riley pulls to the side of the road, stops the truck, then climbs out. Bozer peeks over the side of the truck bed enough to watch her wave, raising her arm high so it pulls up the crop top under her flannel shirt. Bozer doesn’t particularly like this plan, but he has to admit it’s pretty sound.  _ After all, what trafficking operation will be able to resist a victim who pretty much walks right into their hands? _

“Hey, think you could help me with this? It’s making all kinds of smoke and I don’t know anything about cars.” Riley’s putting on her ditzy voice. It sounds wrong to Bozer, because he knows her, but it clearly puts the guard at ease, since his hand moves off the gun concealed at his side and he steps toward Riley, who appears to be struggling to pull the hood up without releasing the interior latch. She’s bent over with her back to the guy, and Bozer can tell he’s about to grab her.

The second he does is the second Riley reacts. Using the front of the truck, she shoves off, walks her feet up the grill, flips directly over the guy, and grabs his neck. By the time they’re on the ground, he’s out cold and Riley is the one with the gun.  _ Damn, that never gets old. _

She opens the gate, and Bozer drives the still-smoking truck through, parking outside the house. She picks the front door lock, and they step into a kitchen that looks like it’s been turned into a command center. A map of the No-Go challenge they were following is tacked to the wall, along with ones that look like they’re happening on other continents. Riley points to a pile of backpacks against the wall below the maps. 

“Bozer, look through those bags. See if you can find a couple sleeping bag stuff sacks. If they say waterproof they’ll be airtight too.”

“I get the feeling you’re channeling Mac right now, aren’t you?” Bozer says.

“Yeah. We have to get down there and get to those kids, but we have to do it quietly or we’ll be dealing with a hostage situation. So we need to take out the guards without letting them alert everyone that they have company.” She glances at a gas cylinder in the corner. “We’ll use that to knock them out.”

“Nice.” 

Once they’ve found two bags, they make their way to the stairs, knocking out the two guards waiting at the top. There’s some faint noise coming from down there, and when Riley opens the door, Bozer flinches. 

“Maybe we should find out just how much experience he has.” 

_ No, no, no. _

* * *

Riley drops the sleeping bag and goes right to swinging the mostly empty gas cylinder at the first guy at the bottom of the stairs.  _ No more keeping it quiet. If they so much as laid a finger on Mac, I am going to personally murder them.  _ She’s furious, a red-hot rage burning through her that masks everything but the kicks and punches needed to take down every single person in that room (well, at least the ones Bozer isn’t taking out with a chunk of pipe). 

The man she recognizes from her files as Derek Diresta sets a phone down on a table and reaches for a gun, but Riley aims and fires, knocking the weapon out of his reach and sending splinters from the wood flying. 

“Step back, or get two in your skull before you can even touch that gun,” Riley snarls. “Don’t give me an excuse to pull this trigger again, scumbag.” She feels cold and numb, dangerous. Like she could do anything right now and feel nothing.  _ Is this what it’s like in Jack’s head when we get into a firefight? _ She’s never really felt it like this before. 

“Mac?” She asks. He’s huddled away from the chaos in a corner of the room. Riley notices in a heartbeat that his shirt is gone, that he’s shaking, but that he’s still at least half-dressed. “Are you okay?” He doesn’t answer, and she needs to make sure he’s not hurt, so she swings the butt of the gun she’s holding to knock Diresta out with one swift crack, and then lowers it, tucking the gun into her belt and hurrying to Mac. 

“Riley, I need a status report.” Jack sounds like he’s barely avoiding screaming at her. 

Riley glances around the room to see Bozer wrenching their knocked-out goons’ hands behind them and strapping them up with zipties. “We have Mac, he’s safe, I think we got here in time. And we have…six kids here. But I don’t see Ben and Isabelle or Desi.” 

Mac is struggling back into his shirts, which were still hanging loosely from his bound wrists, and Riley can tell he’s on the edge of a panic attack, his chest is heaving shallowly, his hands are shaking, and she can hear him whispering under his breath. 

She knows better than to touch him, but she needs to help him calm down. “Mac, hey, it’s ok. We got you. It’s ok, you’re okay.”

“You have to go get Desi and Ben and Isabelle,” Mac whispers. “He sent them away to kill them.”

“I’ve still got Desi’s signal,” Riley says. “I saw a couple dirt bikes outside. I’ll go get them if Desi hasn’t already managed to rescue herself. Bozer, stay with Mac.” She hates to leave, but Mac will worry more if she doesn’t go help the others. He’s too goodhearted not to. She looks back once as she climbs the stairs.  _ He’s got Bozer, he’ll be okay.  _

* * *

Mac’s still reeling. From first the panicked fear that these men were going to assault him, and then the absolute chaos of Riley and Bozer’s dramatic entry. Riley actually scared him. Her eyes looked empty when she was threatening Diresta, the kind of look Mac saw in Jack’s eyes when he was standing over Murdoc in that barn a month ago. 

_ I’m not the only one who’s going to have a hard time after this op. _ As much as he’s going to want Jack to cling to him and never let go, he’s going to have to make sure he doesn’t monopolize the dad Riley’s also going to need, when the realization of how far she almost went catches up to her. 

_ All of us are going to be a mess. _ He’s pretty sure Desi isn’t going to be taking this well either. He could see the moment in the van when she put all the pieces together.  _ She knows.  _

“Mac…” Bozer whispers. He looks like he’s about to cry. “What did they…”

“No worse than this.” Mac slides down the wall, pulling his knees to his chest. “I’m alright, I just need a minute. Go get those kids free.” 

Bozer nods. Mac knows he doesn’t want to leave, but the kids are the priority here. Mac has training, he can deal with this. He just has to get it under control.

Jack’s voice in his ear is gentle. He can feel the vibrating anger under it, and he’s sure Jack and Matty will be frosty with each other for a couple months again after this mess.  _ He’s going to blame her for this whole thing, even though I said it was my call to do it this way. _

“Hey, kiddo, it’s okay, you’re gonna be home soon, and we can get some pizza and watch _Die Hard_. Or one of your nature documentaries. Whatever you want.”

“Sounds good,” Mac whispers. 

“I’ve got Desi and the kids,” Riley says. “Desi got herself loose and took out the van driver, they were already on their way back.” 

“Alright. Local authorities have been contacted. Get those kids and get out of there,” Matty says. 

Mac is more than happy to do that. With Jack’s voice still in his ear, he helps Bozer usher the panicky college students out of the basement and up to their truck. Desi and Riley meet them there, Desi is sporting a nasty bruise on her cheek and a cut on her forehead, and the van parked at the side of the yard is a battered mess, but Ben and Isabelle look ok, if shaken and scared.

The ride to exfil is a blur. Mac listens to Jack in his ear and tries not to think about anything that happened. He can’t look any of the rescued kids in the eyes, still. They know he’s carrying around his own trauma, and he just can’t think about that now. He just sits in the truck between Riley and Bozer and bends the paperclips both of them keep handing him and tries to keep from panicking. Somehow it’s worse now that it’s over. He can’t stop thinking about what almost happened and even though he doesn’t want to, he’s imagining all the different ways it could have gone so terribly wrong. 

He feels strung out and scared and lost and small. He wants Jack, but Jack isn’t here. Riley and Bozer are helping, but neither of them make him feel as safe as Jack does. Besides, he doesn’t want either of them to fall apart for him. If Riley had actually pulled that trigger, if she’d killed for him…that’s not her job. She shouldn’t have to live with blood on her hands for her family. Mac would have felt like it was his fault she’d have to carry that for the rest of her life. 

His legs don’t want to hold him up when he gets out of the truck, and he stumbles and leans on the side of it. Bozer grabs his arm and helps him into the plane, into a seat near the back, away from where Riley and Desi are helping the kids settle in and the exfil team is doing a medical triage on them to be sure there’s no one who’s in imminent danger of dying. Mac floats in and out, but he’s ‘in’ often enough to hear that the most severe issues are some dehydration and mild shock. Minor wounds, mostly from pulling on handcuffs and rope bonds, are treated, and Mac watches as the kids fall asleep one after another. 

Bozer takes care of the rope burns on Mac’s wrists, so Mac doesn’t need to be touched by someone unfamiliar. Riley checks in with him, holds his hand and accepts a heart-shaped paperclip, but after several minutes she gets a faraway look in her eyes. She sits down and puts headphones on, Mac’s sure the thought of what she almost did is hitting her and she needs a minute. Riley prefers to be alone to process. To put some music on and block out the world. 

He isn’t sure more doesn’t happen, he isn’t really in touch with anything right now. He misses Jack being something solid to hold onto. Bozer is trying, but somehow it’s just not the same.  _ Why? _

Mac wants to go to sleep and wake up feeling better, but every time he closes his eyes his mind decides to play yet another of the infinite ways his time stuck in Diresta’s basement could have been worse.  _ It’s like one of those choose your own adventure books that the middle school library was packed with, except that all of these are equally awful. _ None of the outcomes is a good ending. 

Finally he can’t take it anymore. He can’ make the dreams stop, but there is one source of anxiety he can resolve. He has to talk to Desi.

He gets up, shaking his head when Bozer tries to follow. He doesn’t think Desi wants an extra audience for this. She looks up when he sits down, then goes back to the solitaire card game she had laid out on the table in front of her. He can’t meet her eyes, so he looks at the white bandage on her forehead instead. 

He’s pretty sure Desi is putting the pieces together, what he’s already told her with what she saw in there. He can tell she doesn’t want to ask. Doesn’t want to say a thing. He’s glad she’s not asking, not prying, but…leaving her with questions is probably a much worse idea than giving her the cold truth. He isn’t sure that what she can imagine will be worse than reality, but he needs her to know the truth because he needs her to know what, exactly, will set him off. 

“Like I said, I was in prison for a couple years,” Mac says shakily. “Not a good place to be for someone like me.” He swallows hard. “It’s hard to leave that in the past.”

Desi nods, but she’s not looking him in the eyes. She’s staring at his shoulder. Where his awful scar is once again hidden under a couple layers of shirts. “Hard to leave anything behind when they leave you a reminder.” Her fingers are moving subconsciously over the cluster of flowers inked on her lower right arm. Mac can see spots where the lines are a little thicker, the color darker. _It’s covering up an earlier one._ _If anyone can understand what I’ve been through, it’s probably the person who had to bury her real self so far down no one could hear her screaming at the person she had to become to survive surrounded by monsters._

“Those scars weren’t from prison,” Mac says softly. “Murdoc did that.”

He watches from under the hair falling into his eyes while Desi’s face goes from horrified to furious. 

“An op went bad, and he caught me alone, without my team.” Mac figures it’s best to gloss over the brutal truth of what happened that day. Desi hasn’t been looped in on James yet, and that’s Matty and Oversight’s call to make, not Mac’s, at least not for now. “He…it was almost three months before I escaped.” 

“I’m going to  _ end him. _ ” Desi says. It’s a furious growl that reminds Mac so much of Jack’s responses that his heart clenches. 

“Jack called dibs on that,” Mac says, trying to force a small smile. “But I’m sure he’d let you help.” 

She doesn’t say anything, and he doesn’t know what to say. He just huddles a little further into the seat and leans his head on the window. There’s more. There’s a lot more. But that’s for another time. This is a start. 

He continues to fade in and out until they touch down in L.A. Where he stumbles off the plane and directly to the familiar figure in a black leather jacket standing by himself at the edge of the runway, so close he’s almost being shoved backward by the prop wash. 

“Mac!” Jack yells, and then he’s running, grabbing Mac and pulling him in close. 

Mac buries his face in Jack’s shoulder. Anything he wanted to say, any words he could possibly have come up with, are drowned in a rush of tears. Tears he’s been trying not to let fall since those men grabbed him in the stadium. He doesn’t have to stay strong for anyone anymore, because Jack is here and Jack can be strong for him now. 

“It’s okay, kiddo. You’re safe.” Jack’s arms wrap around him, warm and solid. “You ready to go home now?”

Mac shakes his head. He doesn’t want to move, he doesn’t want Jack to let go of him. He just wants to stay here forever, hold on and let the world spin on around them. Because in Jack’s arms, he’s safe, no one can touch him. 

* * *

PHOENIX GYM

JACK KNEW HE'D FIND DESI HERE

Jack pushes open the doors to the training room, listening to the rhythmic thud of fists on a sandbag and the rasp of tired breathing. There’s only the bare minimum of lights on in the room, and they’re dimmed. He can only see the silhouette of what’s happening from here. 

He closes the door with more of a thud than necessary, and lets his steps echo against the floor as he walks. It’s not a good idea to sneak up on any agent with nerves this strung. Especially not one like Desi. Jack has the feeling he’d be on the floor if he did. 

“Dez?” He asks. She lets up for only the barest moment before driving her fists against the bag again, like a tiny little flutter in a steady heartbeat. He can tell she’s been at this a while, a layer of sweat is shining on her back and arms in the dim light, and he can see the minute tremble and jump of the muscles in her shoulders. 

She has a lot of new ink. Jack remembers some of these tattoos from when she was training at the Farm, but plenty are unfamiliar. He can see a few that are clearly cover-ups. Desi's penchant for long-term ops probably often meant getting tats that would identify her as a member of an organization, or show her rank. But once that op was over, she'd need to erase that group's markers or risk being outed by her next infiltration targets. 

Desi is panting, her hair half out of the ponytail she had it tied in. Her arms and legs are shaking. But Jack knows she won't stop until she collapses. And he knows there's no way to talk her out of it.

"Want to go a few rounds?" he asks. 

"Yeah." Her voice is subdued.  _ That's wrong _ . Jack's always thought of Desi as a force of nature. Watching her crumble is like seeing Niagara Falls dry up. 

He sheds his jacket and grabs a pair of gloves, stepping up into the padded training area. Memories of Mac trapped underneath him, thrashing and terrified, push up into his thoughts, and he shoves them away for now. It’s not Mac in here shattered and haunted. But he does know how Desi must feel. 

She steps up beside him, her own gloved hands raised. Jack takes a swing and she ducks, reaching for his extended arm. He pulls back, dancing just out of reach, instinctively seeking an unguarded space to strike. 

She makes a clumsy swing at him, uncoordinated and sloppy, and he blocks it easily, throwing her backward. She’s tired and emotional, he didn’t expect to face her normal dangerous strikes. He just wants to give her the chance to wear herself out doing something other than pounding a bag over and over. 

He knows she’s lugging around almost as many demons as Mac. While her after action reports are crisp and professional, Jack has plenty of experience reading between the lines. And he knows the kind of people she worked with, the things a woman might have to do to earn a place in the hierarchy of monsters. He knows she has blood on her hands because of her past, because of the things she’s done to fight her way into the places the agency wanted her. But he’s sure there are other things she’s placed on the table, things he knows she would have hated.  _ She’d say it was her choice, but the truth is, it’s what the agency wanted, and saying no would either blow the mission or get her killed. _ Jack can’t help thinking of Bishop. How Mac was put in the impossible position of choosing certain cruelty or the threat of losing his freedom forever.  _ That happened once, and I hate that it did. Desi’s run so many undercovers.  _

_ There’s a difference, but in the way that matters there’s no difference at all. _ Both Mac and Desi have been hurt by things beyond their control. And if he had to guess, both of them have justified it by assuming they deserved it. Jack knows Mac could definitely have walked out of CCI any time he wanted, but he thought he was a killer. That he didn’t deserve kindness or safety. And knowing Desi, she’s told herself the same thing. That the roles she’s had to play, the blood that’s on her hands, disqualifies her from being treated like a valuable human being.  _ I’ve seen it a lot, since she’s come back.  _ Desi acts like a toy soldier, a robot, following her orders and doing her job. The past few weeks it’s started to ease, being around people who actually care is helping; but Jack still sees the scars her life has left. 

“Don’t humor me!” She snaps when Jack pulls a punch that probably would have laid her out. 

“Dez, come on. Don’t punish yourself.”

“I have to be better. So it never happens again. So no one touches him.” Her voice is a harsh rasp. “There can’t be a next time.” 

“Desi, listen to me.” Jack grabs her by the shoulders. She can’t shake him off easily, she  _ is _ tired and worn down. “This wasn’t your fault. Hell, I couldn’t have done anything more in the same situation. Matty made a call I don’t agree with. But that doesn’t mean anything that did happen, or could have happened, today was your fault.” 

He can’t tell whether she’s going to scream at him or break down crying. And in the end, it’s neither. She just…crumples. Sinks down from under his hands to the floor mat, in a boneless way Jack is too familiar with. The absolute brokenness of someone who’s finally reached a point where they can’t compartmentalize and bottle things up anymore. He sighs and slides down to the floor to sit with her, waiting until she’s ready to talk. 

* * *

Desi can feel Jack’s eyes on her. She knows she must be an absolute mess right now. Exhausted, bruised, sweaty and shaking. Trying not to just roll over and sob into the floor mat for three hours. 

"Jack, I…” She looks down at her hands. She's so easily capable of destruction. Of tearing someone apart, with her weapons or her words. She's never been much of a healer.

"You don't gotta say anything, Dez. Not right now." Jack leans against the wall, peeling off his own gloves and setting them aside.

"How is he?"

"Scared. Finally fell asleep on the couch with his dog." Jack shrugs. "I told him I was gonna be leaving for a bit, so he wouldn't wake up and freak out that I was gone."

"You didn't have to come."

"You shouldn't be alone tonight either." Jack says. "Mac is sleeping, which he really needs, and Riley and I are on for pizza and skee-ball tomorrow, she always wants to wait longer to decompress. So right now, I’m all yours. I know you, and I know you're gonna wear yourself out, bloody your knuckles, and then sit here and think and tear yourself apart for what you can't undo. "

“And I shouldn’t? Jack, I can’t stop reliving everything I did to him. Every time I hurt him. And the rest of you had to watch me just steamroll over his life.”  _ Why didn’t they say something? Stop the train wreck before it got worse?  _

"It wasn't my place to tell you.” As usual, Jack knows what she’s not saying just as well as what she is. “It was Mac’s decision. We all found out kind of like you did. Circumstances he couldn’t control. It hurt to know it hadn’t been his choice to let us in. We’re past that, but…I didn’t want it to happen again.”

“And then it did.”

“He told me he was going to tell you. Just kept getting interrupted.” Jack sighs. “I thought those ridiculous levels of miscommunication only happened in all those generic Hallmark rom-coms.” 

Desi frowns, letting her left hand trace the lines of the flowers on her right arm.  _ He was trying. The conversation in the truck about being a vigilante, what he was talking about on the way to the stadium…he kept trying to find the right time, and it never happened. _

"If he never forgives me, that's exactly what I deserve."

"Mac isn't like that."

"All I do is break things. I'm a bull in a china shop, Jack." _ Always have been, always will be.  _ She has no tact, no gentleness. Just hardheaded determination to get the job done fast and well.  _ Never have been much of a people person. _

"So am I." Jack puts an arm around her shoulder. "And you're not the only one who accidentally made that kid relive a lifetime of trauma." He sighs. "Not two months after I met the damn kid, I was tryin' to teach him how to fight. Pinned him to the ground and was on top of him, tryin' to get him to tap out. Watched him have a freakin' panic attack under me. Right here in this damn room.” There's a faraway look in his eyes, like he's actually reliving the whole thing. "He forgave me, and he's never once held it against me. That kid's one of the rare few honestly  _ good _ people in this world, Dez.”

She nods, then swipes at her cheeks and leans into Jack’s shoulder, crying. There’s no point in holding it back any longer, and Jack won’t judge. As a matter of fact, when she presses her face into his shirt, it’s already wet.

_ It’s not okay. None of us are okay right now, and it’s going to be a long time before we are. But now we can start getting there together. _


	22. Treason+Heartbreak+Gum

###  321-Treason+Heartbreak+Gum

PHOENIX LABS

RILEY JUST BECAME THE WEEK’S GOSSIP STORY

“Paris?” Bozer asks. “He asked you to go to Paris for the weekend?”

“For a skip chase.” Riley insists, collecting the new improved ‘sticky bug’ from Jill. The small transmitter can be attached to any surface and has a range of two hundred yards. “And Mama Colton is coming too.”

“Still. That’s pretty romantic,” Jill says. “You think maybe he’s going to pop the question?”

“He might.” Honestly Riley’s sort of been expecting it every time Billy comes to see her now. She knows he wants to move their relationship to the next level. She’s not sure if that’s going to be talking about moving in or putting a ring on it, but Billy strikes her as the old-fashioned type. Which means she’s pretty sure he’s going to go for the second option. 

“I hope you’re packing a nice dress with that,” Jill says as Riley slips the bug into her rig’s traveling case. 

“As a matter of fact, one of Bozer’s new bulletproof spring line.” Riley chose the simple, elegant black one. There was a red one with a plunging neckline, and a deep orchid with a long sheer skirt, but she’d finally decided on the classic option.  _ Plus, it’s the most comfortable to move fast in. _

Like she said, Paris isn’t just a weekend getaway, it’s a job. Millionaire tech giant owner and playboy August Roth decided to spice up his life by hacking into his own firm’s security contracts and stealing top secret government research, specifically a technological doomsday button that’s designed to cripple an entire country’s communications infrastructure. Now he’s fleeing justice and most likely planning to sell his ill-gotten gains to the highest bidder. 

On paper, that’s the reason the Coltons came to Riley for this op. She has to admit, the job does have Phoenix written all over it. And a skip proficient in computer technologies is definitely her area of expertise. But she knows Frank Colton is equally as capable of matching wits with Roth. It’s not like she’s the Coltons’ only option. 

Matty greenlit the teamup, and Riley’s flight leaves in three hours. She’s just stopping in to get the last things she might need before she takes off. And trying to settle her stomach before getting on the plane.

She won’t deny that her nerves are as tense as they were before her first mission ever. She could run an op like this in her sleep, but the thought that she might come back from Paris with a ring on her finger and a suddenly very different future gives her pause.  _ It’ll never be the same if we get married. _

It’s not that she doesn’t want this; she loves Billy and she loves the thought of spending the rest of her life with him. But it’ll be so different. 

She stayed up until two yesterday talking to Mom. It wasn’t just that she wanted to be sure she had Diane’s blessing if anything happened (and apparently Billy already spoke to her, although Diane is withholding details, which makes Riley VERY convinced of what’s waiting). She also just…wanted to talk about how it feels to make that kind of choice. To decide that someone’s going to become that big a piece of your life.

She talked to Jack too, over breakfast this morning. He didn’t say whether Billy had talked to him or not. She knows he’s never been Billy’s biggest fan, that he thinks Riley could get someone who could offer her better in life. But she’s reminded him that Billy works hard for what he’s got, loves her, and he’s been patient with her. It doesn’t get better than that, and Jack’s had to agree with her. She guesses it probably doesn’t hurt that Jack’s marrying Diane and feels like he doesn’t deserve _her._ _Maybe we always feel like the people we love could find something better than the messes our lives are. But…they love us anyway._

She looks back at Bozer, bending over his desk studiously fixing some part of Sparky’s mechanism. She guesses he’s not having an easy time listening to her talking about a potential engagement when his own girlfriend broke things off only a few months ago.  _ Just another thing that scares me. Relationships in this world can get messed up badly.  _

But there’s risks in anything. And not taking them could mean living with a whole lot of regrets. She knows how much Jack wished he’d done things differently with Diane the first time, and that he considers himself the luckiest man in the world to have gotten a second chance. She’s not guaranteed that.  _ If this is really what I want, then I need to grab on and not look at all the things that can go wrong.  _ The truth is, no one is guaranteed safety. Or a perfect life. And using her profession as an excuse to avoid committing has been a defense mechanism, to avoid getting hurt like she did with Nick years ago. 

_ But I’m past that.  _ Billy’s proved himself to be someone she can trust. Someone who wants to hold onto her in his life despite the struggles their relationship has had. Long distance dating and trust issues on her side haven’t driven him away.  _ I’m pretty lucky. _

Before she leaves, she sits down next to Bozer for a moment. “I promise, no matter how happy I am about whatever happens, I won’t shove it in your face. I know it’s got to be tough to watch.”

Bozer swallows. “I’m happy for you, I really am.” He sets down his tool with a thud and looks up. “At least you’re not dating another spy.” The cold bitterness in his voice stings.  _ It hurt to watch him get his heart broken. He was the most trusting and outgoing of us all. _ And something about that is hiding now, trying to heal. Jack would say it was acting like a wounded animal, and Riley doesn’t disagree with the little voice in her head.  _ Bozer’s retreating a little. Licking his wounds and trying to recover. _ She hopes the scars heal cleanly.

Riley gives him a small half-smile. “I’m sorry, Boze.” She rests her hand on his and twines her fingers through. “If it helps, you’re not going to lose me too. I’m still going to be part of this family.” That’s the one thing she’s told herself over and over.  _ I’m never going to let one relationship rob me of the others in my life. _ “I’m not going anywhere. Just potentially getting engaged.”

Bozer nods, then turns back to his work. Riley stands up and grabs her gear.  _ Okay, time to do this. _ She turns her back on the labs, and then on the Phoenix, knowing the next time she walks through these doors, she very well may be wearing a ring. 

* * *

PARK BENCH

NOT THE OPTIMAL PLACE FOR A CLANDESTINE MEETING

“I thought we agreed. You’d never see me again once I dropped your family off.” Matty shakes her head as Ethan sits down on the bench beside her. She pushes a coffee and a bagel his direction, if his tastes haven’t changed since she knew him, he’s still fond of onion with lox. 

Ethan pushes the food away, shaking his head. “Matty, they’ve got Deena and Mara.”

“What?” Ethan had said there was something he couldn’t talk about over the phone.  _ How? We had him in a safehouse, we cut off all of the ways S-Company could track him. _ She thought he’d be safe. She thought his family would be safe. “What happened?”

“I came home from my job and the front door had been broken down, and Deena and Mara were gone. There was a note left on my table.” He sighs. “It’s Galloway. I know it is.”

“Daniel Galloway?” Matty hasn’t heard that name in a decade. Galloway was one of the agents she and Ethan partnered with often. At least up until that last mission... “He was killed in Sarajevo.” 

“Yeah, well, he’s less dead than we thought.” Ethan hands her the paper. “This has to be him. It’s his style.” Matty takes the paper and nods. The phrasing, the way a knife was clearly stabbed through this into the table, the handwriting...she knows it well. And when Ethan shows her the knife he found in the note, she has to concede this is Galloway. His weapons were always carefully maintained, hand-wrapped grips and blades he sharpened personally. It’s as good as if he’d left a photograph.

“He’s pissed, he has a score to settle with the agency and us, he has an army of mercs spread through the Balkans, and he wants the CIA’s NOC list.” Ethan sighs. “He’s doing exactly what he was trained to. I’m sure of it.”

Matty nods.  _ Galloway’s thing was leverage. He did whatever it took to get our targets, including using the people they cared about against them. _ Matty is a pragmatist, she wasn’t particularly happy with doing that, but they never hurt anyone and they tended to be able to get their targets to cooperate with minimal casualty rates. But having it turned back on her own head is horrifying. 

“Why wait all this time?” Matty asks. “I can see why he’s furious we left him for dead on that op, but…”

“I went ‘rogue’, remember?” Ethan says. “Less than two months after that op.” He shakes his head. “I was pretty much untouchable in S-Company. And so are you, for now. He knows coming for you is a bad move, and I doubt he knows your agents are as close to you as family. But someone trying to pretend to be normal...well, there’s only so much security I can have without things getting touchy. I had a wife and child, I’m the one he saw as the soft target.”

Matty nods. It’s sick, but she’s almost grateful. Because if that monster had gone after Mac or Riley or Bozer… this way she’ll have a clearer head to find Deena and Mara. Which is what she’s going to need to go up against Galloway. 

“We’re going to get your family back, Ethan.”

“I wasn’t sure you’d say that.” Ethan looks relieved, and ten years older than the last time she saw him. 

“Ethan. Whatever was is over. Buried. But there is an innocent woman and a precious little girl in the hands of a madman. And that, I will not stand for.” She frowns. “I’ll help you get them back.”

“The only way we’re going to do that is to steal that list.” Ethan says. “Galloway is too good to show his face if he doesn’t get what he came for. We won’t see him until we can prove we have what he wants.”

Matty nods. She knows he’s not lying. Dan Galloway was one of the best in the agency. He knows exactly what anyone looking for him is going to do. So he’ll be one step ahead. And if they take a chance, he’s ruthless enough to kill Deena or Mara to make his point. 

“You do realize that what we’re about to do is treason. That list contains the names and locations of hundreds of agents around the world. We would be jeopardizing every one of those lives.” Matty’s taken risks before. But this one is huge. 

“I know. But if I don’t give Galloway the NOC list, he will kill my family.” He shakes his head. “And he’ll know if I fake it. But…” He sighs. “I think I can take him down before he gets the chance to use or sell it. It’s a gamble. I know. But he  _ will _ kill my family if I don’t deliver.” 

Matty nods.  _ Hostage situations with more than one relevant person are bad. _ One person held to force someone’s hand creates a more predictable situation.  _ If the kidnapper kills them they lose all leverage and risk the rage of the person they were trying to manipulate coming down on their own head.  _ But with two people important to someone... _ He could kill Deena, or Mara, and still have one left to force Ethan into stealing the list.  _

“I’ll help you get the list.” She says. “Go get the car. And get us a flight to Langley. It’ll have to be commercial. I can’t involve my agency in this.” Ethan nods, and walks away. Matty pulls out her phone. 

She dials Oversight and waits until the woman responds, crisp and professional. “Yes, Director?”

“I’m going to be taking a few days of personal time, Patty.”

* * *

MATTY’S HOUSE

YES JACK IS AWARE OF HOW DANGEROUS IT IS TO SHOW UP HERE UNINVITED

Jack’s genuinely surprised Patty called him. She sounded concerned, and Jack can understand that, because calling in and asking for time off starting at that moment is the most un-Matty-like thing Jack can imagine.  _ Now me...I’ve done that. _

He wonders if Patty thinks it has something to do with Brazil and that op from hell. That Jack and Matty are somehow on the outs enough to make Matty want to step back.  _ Maybe she wants me to try and fix this. _

But Jack knows that’s not it. He’s pissed, sure. Matty knows it, absolutely. But they’ve worked together professionally while personally disagreeing before. He’s never known Matty to run from a fight, especially not from him.  _ It was me and Riley that walked out of the CIA, not her.  _

So whatever’s going on, it’s not about Brazil. It’s not about what happened to Mac, or what almost happened, or what’s tense between her and Jack. 

He knocks on the door, despite knowing that if something is wrong, Matty won’t answer. She doesn’t, so he lets himself in, Matty's locks are harder than average to pick, but Jack’s skills are still intact. 

He opens the door to find a gun pointed at his face. “Whoa, easy Matty.” He raises his hands.

“Jack, of all the stupid things you’ve done, breaking into my house right now is possibly the dumbest.” She sighs, tucking the gun into her belt. “I thought you were…” She stops and turns around, marching away down the hall. Jack follows her.

“Go home, Dalton.” She slams the door to her bedroom in his face, only to open it again a few minutes later and walk out with a backpack that she tosses onto her couch before pulling a picture off her wall and opening the safe behind it. 

“Matty, you haven’t taken a day of personal time since I’ve known you. What the hell is going on?” Jack asks. 

“Jack, you should leave. Now.” Matty sets the extra mags to her gun on the table. “The less you know, the better.”

“That sounds like something you better tell me about, Boss Lady.” Jack says, crouching down to catch her eye. “Because keepin’ secrets around here is just askin’ for trouble. I told Mac not to do dumb things by himself. That applies to the rest of you too. I just didn’t think I’d have to tell you that.” He shakes his head. “The last time one of my team went off on a vigilante personal crusade I didn’t see him for three months.” He rests his hands on Matty’s shoulders. “Now tell me what it is.”

“I’ve got no right to drag you into this.” Matty says, shaking him off and grabbing the backpack on the couch. “It’s my mess. And I’m going to fix it.”

“Your problem is our problem.”

“No, Jack, it’s not. This is a mistake Ethan and I made a decade ago.” Matty shakes her head. “I’m not asking any of you to clean up after me. Go home, Jack. Whatever happens. Just go.” She turns away. “I’m not going to put you or any of the rest of the team in danger like that.” 

Suddenly her lone wolf act makes sense.  _ She knows I’m pissed about the call she made in Brazil. That even though we’ve made up, we haven’t been the same.  _ Their conversations have been limited to work-related matters and she hasn’t been by the house since their dinner. 

“Matty, what happened in Brazil doesn’t have anything to do with what’s happening now. I’m still mad, but that doesn’t mean I’m not still your friend.” Jack shakes his head. “No matter what happened, I’m not letting you go off on some suicide mission alone.”

“Jack, I said go.” 

“Listen, just because Riley is in Paris with the Coltons doesn’t mean I can’t track you to wherever it is you’re headed.” Jack says. “So out with it.”

Matty glares at him, but then her face softens just a little. “You remember Dan Galloway?”

“Of course. He bought it on that op in Sarajevo.” Jack frowns. “You and Ethan were on that op too. Is someone targeting the survivors?”

“Not just someone. It’s Galloway, Jack. He wasn’t dead.”

Jack feels a cold pit opening up in his stomach.  _ It’s Hadley and Griggs all over again.  _ He hasn’t been able to stop thinking about them since that mess with the fallout shelter.  _ How many more agents have we left behind that we should have gone back for? How many have been captured and tortured, or died alone and in agony knowing their team abandoned them? _ He feels sick at the thought of that happening to any of his own people. 

“Apparently he not only survived, but he managed to buy into the very organization that we were sent to take down. Once Ethan put the pieces together, he realized he already knew about him from working with S-Company. Galloway’s been going by the code name Marcus, and he’s reached the position of second in command in The Black Dragon.” 

“Damn.” Jack remembers dealing with the organization while he was still CIA. The Romanian terrorist group had simply been noted as “Dracul” on a lot of papers, leading Jack to joke they were chasing vampires. He doesn’t feel like joking anymore. 

“And now you’re going rogue to bring him in?” He can see why Matty thinks this is her problem.  _ She’s guilty that she left him for dead and angry he turned. She thinks that’s on her. And she’s probably a little ashamed to tell us.  _ It’s not her fault, really, but he can see how she would assume it was. And how she might not want to admit that not only did she abandon an operative, but was also indirectly responsible for him joining a major terrorist organization. 

“And save Ethan’s family. Galloway kidnapped them.” 

“He what?” Jack asks. “Why?”

“He wants the CIA NOC list. Every non-official cover agent they have.” She sighs. “I don’t know what he’s planning to do with it. But if he doesn’t have it in hand in forty-eight hours, Deena and Mara are dead.” 

“And if he gets it, hundreds of agents are compromised.” Jack sighs. “Can we fake it?”

Matty shakes her head. “Galloway has people in the CIA. I’m sure that’s how he tracked Ethan down in the first place. If we show up with the list but there’s no chatter back in the agency about the theft, he’ll know we’re not giving him anything legitimate.”

“So we’re gonna  _ Mission Impossible  _ the damn thing?” Jack says. “Hell yeah. I’m in.”

* * *

THE PHOENIX FOUNDATION

APPARENTLY THEY’VE BECOME THE IMF

“I thought we agreed!” Mac practically shouts. “Where you go, I go!”

“No, we agreed where  _ you _ go,  _ I  _ go. That’s different,” Jack insists, grabbing two more backup mags from his locker and stuffing them into his belt. 

“That’s not fair. Double standard,” Mac grumbles. “If I can’t go on missions without you, you can’t go without me.”

“Your fever’s only been down for two days in a row. Dr. Grey said…”

“I know what she said. I’m  _ going. _ ” Matty’s had his back before. He owes her a lot. Brazil didn’t change that. Nothing that’s happened changes the fact that everyone at Phoenix has done more for him than he’s ever going to be able to repay. 

“No. Mac,  _ I’m _ going, but you are gonna sit down in one of those lab chairs and not move until we either come back or get arrested.” Desi shakes her head. “You’re not going to prison again.”

“This is exactly why I didn’t really want to tell you about my past.” Mac continues to shove random things into his go bag. “If something happens and you all go down for it, then I might as well too.” Besides, they’ll probably get thrown in a black site in solitary. He hopes. “Besides. Even Bozer is going.”

“Hey, I already survived being disavowed in Amsterdam. Gotta check ‘steal NOC list’ off my spy bingo card.” Bozer says. “And who knows when you might need a mask? Tom Cruise always uses one at least once.”

“I’m glad someone finds this amusing,” Desi says. “We will all probably get caught and court-martialed for this.” She checks her gun and slides it into her belt. “Not that that’s ever stopped me before.” 

“Mac, seriously. You need to sit this out,” Jack says. “I’m glad Riley’s in Paris right now, cause I don’t want her mixed up in this. I’ve been trying to make Bozer stop acting like a hero for the past ten minutes. Neither of you needs to be part of this. You’ve already heard too much.”

“Then we’re in it as deep as you are, so we might as well just do this.” Mac says, zipping his go back with a sharp tug. 

“Mac, this is a treason charge. Maybe Bozer stands a chance of some kind of leniency, but they’re going to take one look at your record and throw away the keys to your cell.” Desi says. “Trust me. I’m definitely going down for this, after what I’ve done. And Jack has so many warnings and official disciplinary reports in his file that he doesn’t stand a chance either.” Jack rolls his eyes at her, slinging his own bag across his shoulders. “Go home. And pretend you never heard any of this.” 

“Trust me, I know exactly how this is going to end.” Mac says. He feels cold and a little numb. 

“But if I walk away from this, I’ll hate myself for it. So…I’m coming.” 

The ride to the airport is tense. So is boarding. Mac is half afraid that he’s going to get pulled out of line for a ‘random’ search again, but this time by some miracle they all board without being searched at all. Mac doesn’t want to know what would happen if the extra compartments in their bags had been noticed. It scares him every time they fly commercial. But there’s no way they can take the jet. Patty needs to be able to claim plausible deniability about this whole operation. 

He knows they’re lucky they got adjoining seats, for the most part. Bozer is separated from the rest of them, but he seems content to put his headphones in and watch a movie on the back of the chair. 

Mac and Jack have a window and an aisle seat respectively, and Desi’s right next to them in the aisle seat in the middle. Jack’s leaned back against the seat, but he’s clearly not sleeping. He shifts every few minutes, and finally turns and looks at Mac through half-opened eyes. 

“There’s still time to change your mind, kiddo.”

“I know.” Mac says, tossing a paperclip set of handcuffs onto the tray table. “Part of me wonders if I’m going to wake up any minute now.” He looks up. “Please don’t ask me again or I’m gonna lose my nerve.”

“That’s exactly what I’m going for here.” Jack says. “Come on, Mac. Don’t throw your life away like this. We can handle whatever happens. You don’t need to be here. You and Bozer should get off this plane in Langley and head right back to L.A.”

“And let you and Desi take the fall?” Mac asks. “I can’t do that.”

“Stop being a martyr for everyone else, kid.” Jack says. “You don’t need to suffer just because someone else does. I know it doesn’t sit right with you to watch someone else in trouble, but we volunteered ourselves.” He rests a hand on Mac’s shoulder. “Sometimes you have to let other people make their own choices. And not stick your nose in just because you don’t want to watch them do it alone.” His hand is warm and gentle, rubbing the back of Mac’s neck. “I know you feel like it’s not fair when someone else is in trouble and you’re not. But life’s not fair, kiddo.” 

Mac looks down, playing with the edges of his shirt. He wonders if this is the last time he’ll be wearing something that isn’t orange.  _ Kind of just got used to how colors are supposed to work together. _ He stifles a nearly hysterical giggle. 

“Listen, I made this choice because Matty’s my friend, and I don’t want to see her go up against this Galloway guy alone.” Jack says. “Not that she is, cause she says Ethan’s with her, but that’s as good as alone cause it’s his family on the line so he won’t be thinkin’ straight.” Jack sighs. “But I got a feeling you came along because of me.”

“If you weren’t here, I’d still be doing this.” Mac says.  _ It’s the truth. _ Ever since the Kovacs news, Mac’s wondered what would have happened if Jack had decided to leave. If he’d thought the best way to protect his family was to track that monster down before he came for Jack.  _ I’m glad he didn’t, but I can’t help wondering what would have happened to us. _ If Desi would still have been able to get a job with Phoenix or if she’d still be home in Detroit, working in her family’s restaurant and trying to forget the life she had before. If what happened with Murdoc would have been much, much worse.  _ It’s been impossible to get away from that thought. _ The idea of Jack just vanishing from their lives has invaded his nightmares deeper than he wanted to admit even when he finally told Jack about them.  _ It’s not just Brazil or Murdoc. It’s every single mission we’ve been on…without him. _ Those are the dreams that have eaten away at him, kept the fever simmering in him long after it should be gone. 

But the fact that it’s constant background noise to his daily activity means that he thought about it today. If he’d found out that Matty was going off on her own trying to fix this, he’d still be on his way to help her, with Bozer and Desi if she’d somehow still managed to get a job here. “I’m not doing this for you. I’m doing it for Matty, okay?” He says. “So it’s not your job to try and stop me.”

“And if she does?”

Mac shrugs. “Maybe I’ll listen, maybe I won’t. But that’s to find out later.” 

* * *

LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

DESI’S PRETTY SURE THIS IS THE LAST TIME SHE’LL SEE IT AS A FREE WOMAN

Desi’s not stupid, no matter what her CIA handlers might have thought at various times. She knows a suicide mission when she sees one. And she’s well aware that short of a miracle, this little jaunt down Matty Webber’s memory lane is probably going to land them all on the wrong side of some pretty hefty bars. 

If she thought it would do any good, she’d have cracked Angus MacGyver over that wooden head of his and deposited him at the nearest airport with a ‘If found please return to the Phoenix Foundation’ sign taped to him. He shouldn’t be here, risking a prison sentence again. He most likely won’t stand a chance of getting out of yet another life sentence. Besides, this time, he’d actually be guilty of the crime he was accused of.

It bothers her more to think about him and Bozer going to prison than to think that if it happens to them, it’ll happen to her. She’s taken the risks of being imprisoned or worse if she’s caught since she started her career in deep covers. If she’d been outed, she’d be disavowed and left to suffer whatever punishment her captors decided on. She’s never been that unlucky, but she’s heard stories. Fellow agents have disappeared, as if they never existed. No one knows their names, at least not officially. It could easily have been her. 

Jack is driving like a wild man, whipping in and out of expressway traffic and earning a lot of blaring horns for his trouble.  _ Slow down, or we’ll get arrested before we even make it to Matty.  _ Desi watches Mac and Bozer sliding around in the backseat, and her stomach clenches.  _ Go home. You shouldn’t be here.  _ She knows they know exactly what they’re in for. They’re experienced agents, not kids thinking they’re playing a game. They know, better than many, the potential consequences of their actions. And they still came. 

When Jack parks at the Phoenix safe house that they agreed on as a meeting place, Matty and Ethan greet them at the door. Their flight must have landed just an hour or so ago. 

Matty sighs when Mac and Bozer emerge from their rented SUV. “What are you doing here?”

“Helping.” Mac shrugs. “Besides, I was getting really bored stuck at home and Jack said if I take the toaster apart one more time he’s going to take it away from me.” 

“You do realize that you’ve gotten yourself mixed up in an act of treason?” Matty asks.

“Well, I got this far. They’re already going to have the flight manifests with our names, and even if only Jack and Desi go with you, they’ll trace all of us to Phoenix and assume we were working together. Guilty by association.” Mac is twirling something made out of his paperclips around his fingers in one hand, it’s moving too fast for Desi to see what it is. “Might as well just go through with the whole thing at this point. Might as well hang for a horse as a colt, right Jack?”

Jack groans. “I never should have taught you that expression. It has no potential for good in your hands. Or your head.” 

“Bozer?” Matty asks.

“If he’s in, I’m in.” Bozer looks deadly serious. “I let him take the fall for me once, and walked away clean. I’m not watching it happen again.” He shakes his head. “If we go down, we’re going down together.” He turns to Mac with a weak smile. “No more of this lone ranger hero stuff.”

Desi guesses this has something to do with that murky vigilante past. Mac’s told her bits and pieces more, when she’s come by the house. She still doesn’t have the whole story, but she knows now that Bozer used to make masks to help Mac protect his identity. Mac pushed him away and forced him to stop helping after a bomb that supposedly killed his mentor and fellow vigilante Alfred Pena exploded. And shortly after that, he was caught on camera, with his real face this time, leaving a warehouse before it blew up, the same warehouse where the body of George Ramsay was found. 

There’s so much going on here it’s making Desi’s head spin, because apparently this Pena guy resurfaced as the notorious bombmaker ‘the Ghost’ a few years ago. And is the guy who almost blew Bozer up a few weeks ago.  _ It’s going to take me a year just to get everyone’s stories straight in my head. _

“Well, I know better than to argue with Jack or Desi, so I guess that means you’re all in,” Matty says. “Come on inside.” 

Ethan pours them all mugs of coffee, and Desi knows it’s bad when Jack doesn’t turn down the drink.  _ He calls it stump water, says it’s the most disgusting thing he’s ever tasted. _ She couldn’t even win him over with her Vietnamese version. 

“What’s the plan?” Mac asks. “Are we hitting the Langley offices during the day, or at night?” He’s nursing his own cup of coffee between his hands, but Desi notices he hasn’t taken a drink yet. She swallows a bitter sip of her own and wonders idly if condensed milk comes in little cups like creamer.  _ Then again, it’s not like that will matter to me after the next forty-eight hours. _

Ethan glances at the whole team. “We’ve been discussing strategy since we got here. Desi will throw too many red flags showing her face around the CIA after being blacklisted so recently.”

“Which means I’ll be holding down the fort at the safe house.” Desi says. “Got it.” 

“Actually, I’d like you, Mac, and Jack on the ground in Romania. Try to find Deena and Mara before the handoff. If we take away Galloway’s leverage, we never need to let him get his hands on the NOC list.”

“How are we going to do that?” Jack asks. 

Ethan speaks up, his voice shaking slightly. “The only lead we have is that one of Galloway’s former informants is still active there. A U.S. expat named Brian Hayes. He fled a charge for fraud and embezzlement that was funding an expensive gambling habit. Apparently he didn’t change his ways, because he was acting as a source on the black market money laundering in underground prize-fighting rings.” 

Matty hands Jack a dossier. “This is all we know about Hayes. He’s the only connection we have to Galloway right now. See if you can find him and flip him.” 

“Got it.” Desi says. “Overnight plane ride, here we come.”  _ Damn, I was just getting the feeling back in my legs. _

* * *

CIA HEADQUARTERS

LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

THEY’RE ACTUALLY DOING THIS

“So how are we going to play this?” Bozer asks, staring out the side window of their unmarked, plateless van at the CIA offices. “Spike some guy’s coffee and drop from the ceiling of their super secret vault?”

Matty sighs. “Bozer, this isn’t like the movies. The NOC list isn’t on a disk. It’s an encrypted file on the phone that belongs to the director of the CIA.”

“Too bad Riley’s in Paris. She’d probably just be able to clone it and we’d be done.” Bozer sighs. 

Ethan shakes his head. “She’d still have had to have her hands on it. The phone doesn’t connect to any internet signal. It has to be hardwired via USB to anything else for a download to happen, and even then, there are passcode protections.” 

“So what are we going to do?” Bozer asks.

Ethan cracks his knuckles. “Lucky for us, I have light fingers. And a bit of a reputation for keeping fellow agents on their toes.” 

“You’re going to pickpocket Director Huang?” Bozer asks. 

“Yep.” Ethan steps out of the van. “Wish me luck.” 

Bozer watches as the man crosses the parking lot, his hands full of papers and folders. He pulls out his phone and tucks it between his ear and his shoulder, stepping inside the building by following someone else through the doors.

_ The trick to getting into places you don’t belong is to confidently BS your way through it, like you  _ do _ belong. _ Bozer snuck onto a film location shoot once that way, carrying a tray of coffee cups.  _ I was sort of hoping the long shot of getting a script directly into the hands of a director would work. I was also eighteen and kind of crazy.  _ His film script had been promptly thrown out, and so had he, but he’d also gotten as far as the director himself before getting outed as an unknown member of the crew. Hopefully, it goes as well for Ethan as it did for him. 

He watches through the glass doors (deceptively clear, according to their building schematics those are both bulletproof and reinforced enough to withstand a collision from anything less than a small tank) as Ethan ‘accidentally’ collides with an actual employee, and lifts his clearance badge while the man is bent over helping clean up the papers that spilled all over the floor. He swipes his way past the scanners that block entry to the main building, and then he’s out of sight. 

They’re not on comms, the CIA’s security tracks and monitors any incoming or outgoing signal, so Bozer has no idea what’s happening now. He sits as still as he can, tapping one foot and gnawing his thumbnail, a nervous habit he thought he broke years ago. 

Matty is sitting quietly, staring out the window. Bozer’s sure she’s as anxious as he is, but she hides it better. He wonders if he’ll ever be that good at restraining his emotions. Then he wonders if he wants to be.  _ It might make some things easier. _

He wishes he could have mustered up a little more excitement for Riley, earlier. After all, she’s probably about to get engaged. He ought to be thrilled for his best friend (one of them, anyway). Instead, all he feels is the gnawing pit of emptiness that’s been there since Leanna left.  _ She made her choice and I respect that. _ She’d even said they might be able to start over where they left off. But…he already knows that was a weak attempt at putting off the truth. The truth that they’re over. They want different things, and he has to accept that. Leanna’s plan is to be a career woman, and he knows she loves what she does. He can’t fault her for that. 

He’s never going to be as deeply invested in the spy world as she is. It doesn’t matter that they have the same training. He just isn’t the type. He’s never going to be as far in as Matty or Jack or Desi or Riley, or even Mac. He lives with one foot in the clandestine operations world, and one foot in the mundane one of movie scripts and restaurant jobs. He’s never been able to leave the Bozer that was in the past. 

_ Maybe it’s because I had a life before all this _ . He doesn’t know Matty’s story, but he does know Jack went into the army because his family didn’t have the money to send him to college. Desi dove into covert ops after her college graduation, after that brief and apparently unsatisfying stint in search and rescue. Riley was hired (well, more like shanghaied but the alternative was prison) after her  _ high school _ graduation. And Mac…well, there’s not really anything about his life before Phoenix that he would care to remember fondly. 

But Bozer has fond memories of the world outside the doors of Phoenix. Flipping burgers and talking about his projects with Tony at the restaurant. Night shoots with his film class while chugging Red Bulls to stay awake. There are pieces of a normal life he still misses. 

_ Maybe it’s time to accept that I’ll never fully fit into this team the way the others do.  _ It doesn’t mean he has to leave. It just means he won’t really be one of them in some of the same ways.

He jumps when the back doors of the van open.  _ Did we get caught? Is this how it ends? _

And then Ethan’s breathless voice yells, “Drive!” 

Bozer leaps into the driver’s seat and guns the engine, whipping them out of the garage and onto the street. There’s a rolling thud from the back and he glances into the rearview mirror at approximately the same time Matty yelps, “Is that  _ Director Huang? _ ”

“Yeah, well, it turns out he’s very attached to that phone, and his guys were giving me a little trouble.” Ethan rubs at a bruise on his jaw. “Besides, we need him to unlock this thing. Otherwise there’s no guarantee that we’ll be able to hack the passcodes in time.” 

Matty sighs. “Now we’re definitely going to be on every watchlist in the country. And your picture will be everywhere, so good luck getting on any flight out of the country now.” She glances at Bozer. “I’m going to find us a safehouse that shouldn’t be on anyone’s radar. We’ll get there and then decide what to do.” 

Bozer whips the van in and out of traffic, just like Jack was driving earlier.  _ We can do this. No problem. We just became the most wanted people in the US. No biggie, right? _

* * *

THE ROMANIAN VERSION OF FIGHT CLUB

HOPEFULLY HAYES IS STILL A GAMBLER

“Matty’s calling.” Jack sets the phone on the van console and turns it onto speaker, barely taking his eyes off the warehouse that’s just starting to collect a straggling group of men in the twilight. Mac can tell the difference between the fighters and the gamblers at a glance. The distinctions are about the same as they were in prison. The fighters move confidently; even though they’re all sizes and weights. The gamblers have an edge about them, a nervous jitteriness that comes with the territory of staking your living on six-to-one odds. Mac had always been good at sorting out the physically violent inmates from the ones who preferred to play the field and find safety in risky alliances. He hopes he won’t have reason to need that skill again, but the truth is, whatever’s on this call will probably be the final nail in the coffin. 

“Yeah Matty, what’s up? You got the list?” Jack asks.

“And Director Huang.” Matty says.  _ Wait, what? _

From somewhere in the background Bozer mutters, “Go big or go home, I guess.” 

“You abducted the director of the CIA?” Desi asks. “Damn. See if you can get him to fire Tobias Franco while you have him under your thumb.” 

“I appreciate your amusement, Agent Nguyen, but this is a very serious situation.” Matty sighs. “Ethan was most likely caught on camera, we have to assume that he was. Which means he’s now going to be unable to fly into Romania for the meet.”

“Damn it.” Jack sighs. “What now?”  _ This is bad. Galloway knows Ethan, if one of us tries to stand in, we’ll be made in a heartbeat.  _ Mac’s heart jumps into his throat.  _ Did we do all this for absolutely nothing at all? _

“I’m going to try and get the codes to unlock the NOC list on that phone. In the meantime, Bozer at least is still not a wanted fugitive, so he’s going to fly over and meet you, with the list, ASAP.” Matty says. “He’s also brought along his mask kit.”

“Ooohh I see where this is going,” Jack says. “One of us _is_ going to pretend to be Ethan.” 

“I told you we were going to need masks!” Bozer sounds triumphant and vindicated. “Simon Pegg’s got nothing on Wilt Bozer.” 

“And Wilt Bozer needs to get  _ on _ a plane,” Matty says, rather sharply. “I’ll call you when we have the access codes.” Mac wonders how she plans on getting them. He’s well aware she literally wrote the book on interrogation, but also, Director Huang didn’t get that corner office by being soft. He’s not going to be easy to crack. And asking Riley to long distance assist is out of the question. Mac is with Jack on that one at least. She doesn’t need to get involved. Especially not if she’s getting engaged right now. Jack told him, before everything hit the fan with Matty, that Billy had asked for Jack’s blessing.  _ At least he’s old-fashioned that way, I get the feeling Jack would have had words with him otherwise. _ Mac doesn’t blame him for being protective of Riley.

And the last thing she needs right now is to have an engagement ring swapped out for a pair of handcuffs, and a lifetime with her husband traded in for a life sentence. At least she might have a shot at something resembling a normal, good life. Mac gets the feeling Bozer’s been so hard to shake because he’s had Leanna on his mind a lot lately, and he feels lost without her.  _ Probably figures he’s going to spend the rest of his life alone anyway. He’s so dramatic. _ Mac has to grin at the way Bozer sees the world. 

The call ends, and Mac watches Jack shove the phone back into his pocket.

“Did you have to bring food in here?” Jack grumbles, turning to Desi. 

“Aren’t we just waiting for Hayes to show up?” Desi says. “I can’t eat while we’re waiting?” She tears off another chunk of the sugar-covered cone and waves it at the warehouse before taking another bite. “Chimney cakes are  _ the _ best thing at the street vendors here.” She frowns. “ _ Someone _ wouldn’t let me get the kind with ice cream in it.”

“This is a rental!” Jack insists. 

“Trust me. If we get caught and spend the rest of our lives eating prison food in some black site, we might as well live large.”

Mac flinches.

“Sorry.” Desi says, her voice dulling as she immediately realizes her mistake. “I didn’t mean…”

“It’s fine, and you’re right,” Mac says, catching her eye in the rearview mirror. “I missed street vendor churros. Used to grab them in the mornings when the only thing that would keep me on my feet after a hard night was sugar and caffeine.”

He doesn’t think he ever told anyone that. But there’s something about Desi’s lack of tact that makes him feel less like he’s as fragile as Jack’s mom’s good china. He smiles at her, hoping she’ll know that means he’s not upset. He hopes Jack won’t say anything, and he doesn’t. He glances at Mac in the mirror briefly, and when Mac nods, he turns back to where he’s got the binoculars trained on the warehouse. 

Desi holds the pastry back toward the back. “Want some?”

“I don’t think I want to eat right now,” Mac mumbles. His stomach is tied up in knots.  _ A family’s lives depend on what we do right now.  _

Jack frowns when the door opens but doesn’t let anyone in. “I think we’ve been made. The van’s drawing too much attention.”

“So what now?” Mac asks.

“Well, we can’t leave, but we can’t stay here. I think we need to go in,” Desi says. “Pose as spectators and see if we can find Hayes in there.”

“You think they’ll let us in?” Mac asks.

“Let me do the talking.” Desi takes her hair down out of the short, scruffy ponytail it’s in, and undoing another button on her shirt. “Worst comes to worst, I’ll distract him while you slip in.” 

“You sure you wanna do this, Dez?” Jack asks. 

“Yeah.” She squares her shoulders and then relaxes them again, hopping out of the van and walking up to the door with a rolling, slinky stride that’s nothing like her usual collected, dangerous moments.

Jack climbs out but then leans against the van, and Mac follows suit. He’s too far away to hear what Desi’s saying, and it sounds like she’s speaking a foreign language anyway. He thinks maybe it’s French.

Desi turns around after about five minutes and shouts. “ _ Allez _ !”  _ Yeah, she’s playing French. _ She speaks the language almost as fluently as she speaks Vietnamese or English; Mac learned while talking to her while she was cooking for the group dinner that her parents were bilingual.  _ Makes sense, Vietnam was a French colony. _

Once they’re through the door, Desi pulls them a little aside, into a corner where the shouts and cheers and grunts from the area near the fight will cover their voices. “If anyone asks, I’m Huong Delacroix. Small time arms dealer with big fish friends who’s here to try and increase her ill-gotten gains.” She shrugs. “Old cover I never burned the bridges on.” 

“Nice.” Jack grins. “And I guess we’re the bodyguards.”

Desi nods, but Mac catches a grimace as she does.  _ I bet she couldn’t pass me off as a bodyguard, so she told them I was something a little different.  _ He lets it slide. They need Hayes, and he can handle being assumed to be someone’s arm candy. Desi won’t make it weird or try to sell it too hard, he knows that already. 

“Spread out, see if you can find Hayes,” Desi says. “I’m gonna go throw a little money around, make sure I live up to my reputation. Hopefully Hayes will be hanging by the bookie, but if he spooks be ready to grab him.” 

Jack nods, and moves off with Mac. He doesn’t seem to have any intention of splitting up further, and Mac’s glad. Maybe it’ll look like Desi has prior claim on him, and that she’s not someone to mess with, but he still doesn’t want to take any chances. Half these guys are clearly very drunk.

The room is hot and close and smells like sweat and alcohol and blood. Mac doesn’t like it. He sticks close to Jack as the circle the outside of the shouting men waving their fists in the air and shouting in about four different languages at the men pummeling each other in the ring. 

He jumps when Desi practically materializes next to them. 

“Hey, guys, I don’t see him yet, and it looks like Fight Club is wrapping up,” Desi says. “Anyone got a genius plan for finding Hayes in the next minute?”

“That’s Mac’s department, but I think I know how to keep them here a little longer,” Jack says. The next second, he’s pulling off his jacket and pushing his way into the middle of the fight ring. 

“Hey, what gives, I haven’t had my shot yet!” He shouts. Mac knows when Jack fakes drunk, and he’s doing it with gusto now. 

“Hey, fellas.” Jack says, putting up his fists. “How ‘bout it, or are you too afraid to tangle with a broken down fat old man, huh?” He shuffles a few steps, punching the air. “You, big guy?” He points out a man with several tattoos and a glowering stare. “Oh, come on. Look, I won’t even be able to reach high enough to break that pretty face. What are you scared of?” 

Clearly, that got the man’s attention. He pushes his way into the ring as well, staring Jack down with a frown that’s anything  _ but _ pretty. 

The man running the betting is shouting now. “Ten to one on the American!” He shouts. Men who were straggling off turn around, pulling out bills and waving them. Men who can’t resist the gambling itch enough to walk away from this.  _ And if our intel is right, Hayes will be one of those kind. _

“There!” Mac points over the heads of a couple guys with greasy mustaches. Hayes has grown out his hair and it’s grey instead of reddish brown now, but Mac recognizes the small birthmark at the corner of the man’s eye. 

Hayes must hear him. He turns and bolts.  _ Damn it, why do they always run? _

“Got him!” Desi’s already running. Mac chases after her, but by the time he catches up, she’s two steps behind their target. The man shoves over a stack of boxes as he runs past them, but it doesn’t even slow Desi down. She leaps up onto one of them like a cat, and then throws herself forward, tackling Hayes and pulling him to the ground. By the time Mac scrambles over the fallen boxes, she’s already gotten zipties on the man’s arms and is hauling him to his feet. 

“Nice work.” Mac jumps at the voice from behind him and turns around. Jack has a bloody nose and a big bruise on his cheek, but he’s grinning. “Hope y’all had money on me, cause the long shot just won big.” 

Desi shakes her head and punches him in the shoulder. Jack groans. “Come on, Rocky, let’s get him out of here. We’ve got some interrogating to do.” 

* * *

FANCY RESTAURANT

UNFORTUANTELY, IT’S FOR THE OP, SO THERE PROBABLY WON’T BE A PROPOSAL HERE

Billy pulls out a chair and Riley sits down, tucking her purse with the snub-nosed nine-mil into her lap within easy reach. Mama Colton is back in their hotel room, eating room service food and coordinating the op. Riley thinks they got the much better end of the deal. 

“Your tie’s a little loose, honey.” Riley reaches up to adjust it, then pulls him down for a quick kiss. Billy chuckles, leaning in beside her ear. 

“Should have known better than to trust you secret agents and your cons.”

“Oh, don’t tell me you didn’t like it.” Riley says. She lets go, and he walks around to sit down in his own chair, then pick up a menu. He glances over the top at the table that, according to the restaurant’s booking system, is registered to Roth.

“He’s late,” Billy observes.

“It’s probably fashionable.” Riley’s developed a habit of being early to everything since Matty took over as Director, unless she really can’t help it. Patty was more lenient, but Matty will have whoever is late to her briefing in the doghouse the whole mission. _ I used to straggle in, back in the CIA days, when I still wanted to prove I couldn’t be made to follow the rules.  _ Matty was probably shocked that for once she’d had someone other than Jack to be mad at.  _ He probably appreciated me drawing her ire while it lasted. _

She tried to check in with Matty a bit ago, and got the notice that her phone’s gone dark. Which is odd, but Riley figures a mission came up. She can’t get in touch with Jack or Mac either. Texting Bozer to ask what’s wrong seems tacky when she’s sure he’s probably at home eating ice cream and she’s the last person he wants to talk to now. And she isn’t sure what she’d say to Desi.  _ They might just be on an op, it’s probably nothing. _

“Hey, on your four o’clock,” Billy says. “But unless he’s had some serious cosmetic surgery, that’s not our man.” Riley turns, and sees the woman who’s just sat down at the table registered to Roth.

“Hey babe, I wanna get a selfie.” She says rather loudly, then leans over toward him. She pretends to flip the phone camera, but instead of taking a picture of the two of them, she snaps a shot of the woman and the table and enters it into FRIAR.

It’s not long before a match pops up. “That’s Elena Valois.” Riley says. 

“Should that mean something to me?” Billy asks.

“Not unless you subscribe to the international terrorist watchlist bulletins.” Riley frowns. “And if she’s meeting Roth, my guess is he’s selling the doomsday program.” She glances at Billy. “This just went from a skip chase to an international incident.”

“Good thing we brought you, then.” Billy says. 

Just then, the doors open and Roth walks in, sitting down at the table. Riley leans over a little, trying to hear what’s being said, but she can’t make it out over the rest of the chatter in the room. 

“I need to get ears on that conversation. If he’s selling it now, we have to take them, but my guess is he’s brokering a deal and the flashdrive is at a secondary location. He hasn’t survived on the run this long by being stupid enough to bring it here where he could be killed and it could be taken.” 

“So what’s the plan?”

Riley looks around the room. “Lose the jacket.”

“Not that I’m not looking forward to whatever might happen later, but…this is a little public, don’t you think?” Billy asks, but he’s already pulling the sleeves over his arms.

Riley rolls her eyes. “They’re ordering a bottle of wine. You need to pose as a waiter and get close enough to stick this on it.” She holds out the mini-bug. 

“Yeah, well, those guys have bow ties, not this kind.”

“Come here.” Riley deftly unties his tie, then reties it in a way that resembles a bow tie loosely enough to fool anyone not staring. Jack taught her that little trick. “There, good to go.”

“I had no idea you were so talented with a tie.” Billy chuckles, standing up. 

“You should see what I can do with a bobby pin.” She smacks his arm. “Go plant that thing, before we miss any more of what they’re saying.” He winks at her and walks off, holding the bug loosely in his left hand.

Billy’s phone pings, and Riley can’t help but glance at it. He’s been keeping it out of her reach all night, and looking at something on it.  _ That’s usually my job. _ She has to keep her Phoenix stuff a secret, she told him that early on, and he respects it.  _ He knows me better than to think I’ve got a side boyfriend. _ She appreciates that trust.

And maybe she should return it.  _ Whatever he has going on, he clearly doesn’t want me to know. _

But Riley is a trained spy. And almost without her permission, her hands flip over the phone and swipe the screen to display the full text of the message notification blinking on the front. 

**Keila: Absolutely. Give me a call when you get back. You know you got the best deal in town. **

_ What? _ Riley reads the text twice more, trying to make sense of it in a way that isn’t heart-stoppingly horrible.  _ What deal? No-strings-attached sex? Not spilling to his girlfriend that he’s having an affair with a girl back home?  _ She can’t decide if she wants to open up the phone and get a look at the rest of the texts, or if that will just make her need to run for the restroom and not come out for the rest of the night. 

Riley drops the phone like it burned her as Billy walks back up to the table. “Now you and I have a front row seat for tonight’s show.” He winks. “So let’s sit back and enjoy the evening.” 

“You left your phone,” Riley says, nodding to the table. “I think you got a text.” She’s never had to work so hard on any undercover to keep her face emotionless.

Billy grabs the phone, and there’s no disguising the delight on his face when he sees it. It fades fast, but he clearly doesn’t have Riley’s training, because she saw everything she needed to know.  _ Whatever that text meant, he’s very happy to see it.  _ He tucks the phone in his pocket, pats it, and turns back to Riley. “You know, I think it’s time to break out the good champagne.”

“The job isn’t even over yet.” Riley says.  _ How am I supposed to survive it? _ They can’t have it out here in the middle of the restaurant. Not when they still have a man to catch. 

_ What is he doing? _ Riley didn’t think Billy would two-time her. But…That text certainly seemed to indicate otherwise. 

She tries to focus on the audio now showing up on her own phone.  _ You need to stop someone from selling a cyberweapon. Focus on the job. Not on whatever else is happening. _

* * *

Jack frowns at the building Hayes’s intel led them to.  _ Well, that’s definitely the kind of place designed to keep a prisoner in. _ The back windows are barred, there’s two guards at the front door, and a few glances through some of the unfortified windows indicate at least four more men inside. 

“On the bright side, I think I know which room Deena and Mara are in,” Jack mutters as he crawls back to where Mac and Desi are waiting in the bushes. 

“That means there’s a dark side. What’s the problem?” Desi asks.

“Galloway’s not stupid. He’s got them in a room that’s got the windows barred, and he has three guards rotating in the hall outside with a fourth one standing at the door the whole time.” Jack sighs. “By the time we got through those guys at the front door, we’d have tipped them off and they might decide to just shoot the hostages for spite.”

“Well, if the front door’s out, what’s the plan?” Desi says. Jack grins.  _ That’s what I love about Desi, she never even assumes quitting could be an option. _

“I think I know how to get them out without going through  _ any _ doors.” Mac says, then shrugs when both of them look at him.

“Not that I don’t trust you could create a portal machine, but I really don’t think that’s your plan here, hoss, so…what is?” Jack asks. 

“Those bars weren’t part of the original design,” Mac says, pointing to the windows. “They’ve been added later, bolted into the masonry. Which means if we apply enough pressure, we should be able to remove them.” 

“So like…hook a chain around them and pull them out?” Jack asks. 

“We’ll never get a car back here without attracting too much attention.” Desi frowns.

“We don’t need a car. There’s another vehicle that might help us.” Mac nods to the bicycles leaned against the wall. They creep over far enough to reach the bikes, and Mac grabs a coil of garden hose as well. 

“Be glad I didn’t interpret your request for a vehicle  _ this _ way, Jack,” Desi says as she reaches for one of the bikes and starts following Mac’s instructions to disassemble it and turn it into a pulley system. 

“Very funny. I’m never going to live that down, am I?” Jack asks. 

“Nope.” Desi holds up the rebuilt bike tire assembly. “How’s this, Mac?”

“Perfect. Now we just need to do that to a couple more.” Mac drops down to his stomach and starts crawling toward the window. “Mechanical advantage,” He whispers. “The more pulleys there are in the system, the less force you need to exert.”

“But that’s made up for by the length of the rope,” Jack says, almost without thinking. He’s heard Mac’s little high school physics lecture more than a few times.

“I cannot believe I just heard Jack Dalton say something that’s both science related and correct,” Desi says as she starts working on another bike. 

“He sort of rubbed off.” Jack grins, watching Mac work his way up to the window and thread the hose through the bars in some sort of pattern. Jack keeps one hand on his gun while he steadies the bikes for Desi, just in case someone comes out and catches them or Mac in the act. “Kid’s got a way of saying things that makes ‘em make sense. Not like they did in a classroom.”

“Probably doesn’t hurt that he tends to demonstrate a lot of the theoretical stuff too.” Desi finishes tightening a bolt. 

Jack nods. “Part of me wants to say he’d be so much better off as a teacher than a spy. I know he’d make kids actually enjoy things instead of just slogging through the homework to check off that class. But…I’m pretty sure there’s a limit on how many classroom explosions can happen per semester.” 

“Yeah. And…he seems happy here.” Desi says. “Now that I know…everything, I know he wouldn’t still be here if this wasn’t absolutely the place he wanted to be.” Jack feels a sudden pinch of guilt. She doesn’t know ‘everything’, she doesn’t know about James. Not yet. But she is fundamentally right. If Mac had wanted out of the field, he could have left. He could be working in R&D, or Jack knows that Matty had been willing to pull strings to get him into MIT. It might be harder for him to get a chance to teach, with his record, but Jack’s sure Mac would have found a way to do what he loved…if that was what he loved. 

He’s seen the way the kid lights up talking to Val or Annabelle, but Jack can also tell that Mac functions best in a one-on-one environment. Large groups of people are more of a struggle for him.  _ A classroom wouldn’t be the best place for someone like him. _ At least not on a permanent basis. 

When Mac creeps back up to them, his shirt and face streaked with grass and mud, but grinning, Jack claps him on the shoulder and then starts threading the end of the hose through the pulleys. He and Desi grab on and pull. 

For a long moment, nothing seems to happen. Then, there’s a groan of metal, a crunch of old mortar, and Jack watches the bars, and a decent chunk of the wall, tumble into the yard. Desi drops the hose and runs for the opening, diving in and shooting through the door. Mac and Jack follow her, and Jack shoves a dresser against the door, hopefully buying them enough time to escape.

He glances around the room. He can see someone huddled in a corner, and judging by the person’s size, it’s got to be Ethan’s wife. “Deena?” He asks. “I’m Jack, you remember me right?” He bends down. “We’re gonna get you and Mara out of here, okay? Where is she?”

“Not here, not here.” Deena’s voice is cracked and wobbling. “They took her away. Somewhere else. She’s gone.” 

“He separated them,” Desi says. “I should have expected that.” She holsters her gun. “Won’t be long before they go around. We need to split right now.” She tugs Deena to her feet. “We have a car out back, we’re getting you out of here.” 

They stumble back out the hole in the wall, and across the yard to the back alley. Jack hears shots ring out, but he doesn’t hear any of his team gasp or cry out, so he’s fairly sure they’re escaping unscathed. They all tumble into the back of the van, and Desi scrambles over the seats into the driver’s seat, turning the engine over and gunning it, as they race away into the night.

Mac’s tending to a bruise on Deena’s cheek and a gash on her arm that’s bleeding slightly, probably from snagging on the broken wall. “We’re going to find Mara too,” He says gently. “It’s going to be alright.” Jack blinks away tears at the sound of the kid’s soft, comforting tone. It’s the same one Jack’s had to use on him all too many times. 

Jack pulls out his phone and calls Matty. But it’s Ethan that answers.

“Jack, please tell me it’s good news.” His voice shakes. “Matty’s in with Huang right now, but I don’t think he’s gonna play ball.”

“We have Deena.” Jack sighs. “Galloway split them up.”

“Damn it!” There’s a sound of something crashing and breaking.

“At least he’s down to one hostage,” Jack says. “We’ve just evened the playing field a little more.” And Galloway will have to keep Mara alive if he wants Ethan’s help. 

“I don’t know where he could have Mara. Hayes was our only shot at this,” Ethan says.

“We’ll figure something out.” Jack wishes they could have raided the house itself, gotten some papers or someone’s phone and tried to get some answers. But with only three people and a civilian to rescue, that hadn’t been an option. 

“Can I speak to Deena?” Ethan asks.

“Sure.” Jack hands over the phone, and he hears both of them immediately break into rapid conversation in Cypriot Greek.

Mac crawls over to lean against Jack’s side. His hands are streaked with blood, and he looks exhausted. Jack pulls the kid over to rest in his lap, running his fingers through Mac’s messy hair while he lets the swaying of the van rock the kid to sleep. 

* * *

Riley pokes at her food. She’s sure this is delicious, but she can’t eat anything with her stomach in knots. 

Billy, on the other hand, seems to have a ravenous appetite. He’s finished with his whole plate before Roth and his buyer have even been served. Riley wonders idly if he has the same appetite about everything.  _ I thought we’d agreed taking things slow was the best. _ She doesn’t want to go down the road of wondering whether he’d have stayed if she’d given him more to stay for.  _ I stuck up for what I wanted out of the relationship, and that’s not a bad thing. If he can’t respect that, it’s his problem, not mine. _ But there’s still a tiny gnawing in her brain that says it’s her fault for being skittish.

_ Stop it. _ She slams her glass down on the table a little too hard.  _ It’s never your fault if someone wants more than you’re willing to give. _ The Jack voice in her head is a grounding presence. It’s been a long time since he had to have the dating talk with her, and she wonders idly if he’ll ever have to have it with Mac. She can’t see Mac dating anybody for a long time, maybe ever, but she knows he’d struggle.  _ When you come from the kind of life where you survived by doing what everyone else wanted, it’s hard to say no. _ Her family situation scarred her. Mac…his whole life has been full of people who never gave him a choice about anything.  _ And he might not even consider the fact that he  _ should _ have one, even now. _

At least thinking about Mac is safer territory than thinking about how she’s going to have to confront Billy later.  _ Because I’m going to meet it head on. _ She needs to know what happened. Something about all of this is so wrong, so unlike the Billy she knows. The one who drove her all the way to Texas to see her grandmother (Jack was very amused by the fact that it seems she has Texas roots after all) and crashed with her on the couch in her apartment watching bad horror movies and eating slightly singed popcorn (Mac had attempted to improve the popper). 

Suddenly, she has a more pressing problem to think about, because Roth and Elena are standing up.

“What happened?” She asks Billy. He looks at her with a raised eyebrow. 

“Thought you were totally wrapped up in their conversation just now.” 

She doesn’t bother to explain, just looks down at her phone where the voice-to-text feature is transcribing the bug’s signal. 

**Twelve million. That is as high as I am willing to go.**

**Fifteen. Anything less, I walk. There are other interested buyers.**

**Twelve and a half. And half of that is payment on delivery.**

**You can have it in your hands within the hour. **

**Then what are you waiting for? **

**I’ll take you there. But you and me, alone. No guards.**

There’s a garbled section where Elena must have turned and spoken to her men. Then nothing. Riley shoves the phone in her purse and jumps up from the table, running for the door where she can just see the two shadows melting into the night.

She races across the parking lot to their own car, a sleek silver one, that while not nearly as pretty as the sports car whipping out of the lot, definitely has the engine to keep up. “Throw me the keys!” She whisper-shouts. 

To his credit, Billy doesn’t argue. He knows she has the official pursuit training. Not that he’s not a good offensive tactics driver, but Riley operates on pure instinct by now. She slides into the driver’s seat and turns the engine over, pulling out her phone. She hands it to Billy. “Open this, open the app that says vehicle tracking, and input the license plate when I tell you the numbers.”

He nods. She rattles off the plate while she slides into traffic. “I’m jacked into the street cams already. They’ll keep tabs on that car. Let us know where they’re going if we lose the tail.” 

“Have I ever told you how much I love it when you do your thing?” Billy asks. 

Riley doesn’t answer.  _ Because you think it makes me awesome, or because it makes your job easier? _ She hates seeing everything in terms of ulterior motives now, but the truth is, she has no idea why Billy is stringing her on if he’s got someone back home who would be easier to date. Unless he finds her useful. The thought is vaguely sickening. She glances in the rearview out of force of habit and then looks again, there’s a black car two cars behind them, doing the same little traffic dance she is, to stay close to Roth’s car. 

“That car’s following us.” Riley says. “Elena must have asked her men to shadow her. She was going to get the device and then have Roth killed.”

“Save herself a payout. I always wonder why people trust anyone who clearly has no scruples about murder.” Billy grumbles. “Like, if they’re willing to kill thousands, why wouldn’t they kill you?”

Riley doesn’t have an answer for that.  _ Guess because we have to assume some trust. Or we’d live in a bubble without interacting with anyone else. _ But Billy’s right, trust can get you killed. Or at least break your heart.

“Maybe they think they know someone.” She needs to take out their tail, but she also feels just angry enough to get into it right here and now. “Maybe that person gave them every reason to believe they were trustworthy.”

“An international terrorist could seem trustworthy?” Billy asks, grabbing for the door handle as Riley maneuvers through traffic. Clearly, he’s not picking up on the subtext. “Anyone who goes around buying doomsday buttons seems inherently untrustworthy!”

It sounds so much like Jack that Riley swallows and blinks.  _ Okay, not the right time to have this conversation. Focus on the mission, damn it. _

She swings around, heading down an alley. For now, it looks like the other car is in fact sight-tailing Roth. But Riley’s sure Elena would be carrying some kind of homing device just in case the vehicles got separated. Which means she doesn’t just have to make the other car lose sight of their tail, she has to stop them cold. She picks up her phone and dials Momma Colton’s number.

“Momma, you still with us?” She asks. 

“Sure thing. Coming up on the intersection your computer says Roth just went through.” Riley’d given Momma her rig (locked to the single open tracking program first) and now that she’s got tracking on Roth’s car, Momma’s been able to join the pursuit.

“We need a favor. There’s a black SUV also tailing them. Can you stage a little incident?” 

“It would be my pleasure.” Momma can argue with people all night, and on a busy street there’s a low risk that these guys will be so pissed off by being hit by a random stranger that they’ll shoot with a lot of witnesses. 

“Thanks, Momma.” 

Riley drives out of the alley and onto a side street.

“What are you doing?” Billy asks. 

“I can tell by now that they’re heading into one of the manufacturing districts,” Riley says. “I’ll go that way, but now we don’t have to hang so close. Once Elena finds out she doesn’t have backup, she’s going to get jumpy.”

She threads the car through the night traffic. If they want both Elena and Roth, she has to let them get the flashdrive. It’s a big risk, but taking both of them down in one go is worth it. She can’t wait to see the look on Matty’s face when she finds out Riley netted Elena Valois. 

She forces her thoughts to skitter away from the brink of fretting about Matty and Jack and Mac. She should be able to get in touch with them. Maybe Mac and Jack finally got cleared for missions again and Mac broke both their phones. But Matty…the mission must be serious if she’s got her phone not accepting outside calls.

“Okay, that car stopped moving,” Billy says. “They’re at the drop location.” 

“Okay, give me the address.” Riley drives a little faster. 

“Wait, they’re moving again.” Billy says. “That was fast.”

“Okay, call the Paris police, tell them to get to that warehouse now.” Riley’s pretty sure they’ll find Roth’s body.  _ Elena didn’t need backup, not really.  _ Riley’s absolutely positive the woman was carrying under that flare-skirted navy dress. _ Wide skirts are my go-to when I want to hide a thigh holster. _

“Which way is that car going?” She asks.

Billy holds up the phone. “Toward the river.”

“Damn it!” Riley shouts. “She’s going to use that program right now!”

“What?” Billy asks. 

“There’s a…well, for lack of a better description, a French version of us,” Riley says. “A dark agency that the government doesn’t officially claim credit for. They operate out of one of those buildings along the river, and their entire basement is a set of servers that have the backups of all the government intel on them. They’re water-cooled, using a system that feeds from the river. It’s an unusual way to handle server heat blooms, but it cuts down on the noticeability of a large air-cooling system.”

“And she’s going to crash it?” 

“And when she does, that’s going to cause a citywide chain reaction.” Riley says. “Their systems are hooked into traffic controls and the electrical grid just like Phoenix.” She nods toward the phone in his hand. “In the directory there should be a set of contacts labeled ‘agencies’. Pick the one that says DAC, Paris Offices. Call them and put it on speaker.”

When the agent on the other end picks up, Riley starts talking. “This is Agent Davis of the Phoenix foundation, ID number USE249T736.” It’s the Phoenix ID that lets other agencies know that she’s a fellow operative. 

She explains the situation as concisely as she can while avoiding crashing. The agency orders a lockdown while she’s still on the phone, but her guess is that’s not going to be enough.  _ Elena had a plan to get inside that building somehow. My guess is, an inside man. _

Once she hangs up, she tells Billy. No sense in starting a mole hunt in the  _ Department de Activites Couvert _ while they’re also trying to fend off a cyberattack. They’ll never find the right person in time.  _ _

“Then I guess we have to get there first.” Billy says.

Riley nods and floors the accelerator. She keeps her eyes on the road, Billy telling her where Elena’s car is and how close they are. 

“Take a left and we’ll be right on top of her.”

Riley swings a hard left, and sees the sports car just passing in front of them. She gives the engine a little more gas, pushing far enough forward that she can clip the rear of the car. The tires screech as the vehicle spins out of control, skidding across the lane of traffic to crash into a bench by the side of the road. Riley’s already hitting the brakes, and by the time the car smashes into the bench, she’s pulled out her gun, sliding across the hood of her own car to stand ready when Elena dizzily opens the door and lurches into the street.

“It’s over,” Riley says firmly. She sees the woman’s hand going for her leg. “Don’t even think about it.”

“You heard the woman,” Billy says, his own gun drawn as he steps up beside her. Riley pulls out her handcuffs and pulls the woman’s hands behind her back, removing the gun and her purse in one fluid motion. She rummages through the purse one-handed, before palming what she came for in a flash. 

Riley hears a whoop of sirens approaching. The vehicles that arrive on scene, though, are only half police. The other half are the familiar dark vans with red insignias indicating DAC teams. Riley hands Elena over to the agents who meet her, a blond guy who reminds her a little of Mac, and a woman with long blue-black hair in a thick braid. She holds up the flashdrive as she rejoins Billy. “Looks like a lot of things are going back where they belong tonight.” She tosses the drive on the ground and steps on it. 

“What…” Billy asks.

“Something went wrong during the op. We caught Valois, and Roth is accounted for,”  _ cops confirmed what I already suspected, Elena shot him at the warehouse, _ “But the flashdrive was destroyed. Fortunately, that means it won’t be falling into the wrong hands again any time soon.”

She doesn’t want a repeat performance of tonight, and with the only copy of the program now squashed into the mud on a Paris street, she’s set back development at least a couple years. She’s learned the hard way that keeping dangerous things under lock and key doesn’t always mean they’re safe.  _ Ever since the Phoenix was breached and Walsh actually made it into Cold Storage, I’ve been skittish.  _ Up until then, she’d laughed at Jack’s insistence that they destroy the dangerous things rather than keep them around. Now, she’s with him.  _ We still have a lot down there that could be a problem. _ Their latest haul from the Passeur raids brought in a stock of chemical weapons, including a drug she’s only ever heard rumors about. 

She doesn’t like the thought that they have ‘The Converter’ in their basement. Patty insists they’re only holding it for R&D to develop an antidote, but it still sets Riley on edge. A potent torture drug whose effects only escalate until the subject dies isn’t something she feels comfortable seeing anywhere near government hands. She can’t do anything about that, but she is making damn well sure this doomsday program doesn’t join the list of dangerous things in their basement. 

“Damn, girl!” Billy says as they climb back into the car. “That driving was something.”

“Learned from the best.” Riley brushes her hair out of her face. “Wish Jack could have seen this.” 

“I wish he was here too.” Billy says. 

“Are you okay? You’ve been acting really weird, Billy.” 

“I’m fine. Better than fine, really.” He straightens his jacket. “I have an adrenaline rush like no other, baby.” He chuckles. Riley starts driving them back toward the hotel, she needs to have the conversation with Billy in a room where losing control of her emotions doesn’t end with her crashing or flipping the vehicle, but instead, he points out a small riverside park. 

“I hear Paris is beautiful in the moonlight,” Billy says. “Care to take a stroll?”

“Ok.” She wonders if this is how she’s going to find out everything. Or get broken up with. Or do the breaking up. She’s just confused.  _ He’s acting like everything is normal. Like we’re still normal. _ The sick thought crosses her mind that maybe this  _ is _ normal. Maybe he’s always had the girl back home. 

She parks the car and they step out. Billy drapes his suit jacket around Riley’s bare shoulders, and she doesn’t want to think about how good the warmth feels or how comfortable this is. It’s the kind of gentle, respectful gesture she’s gotten used to from him.  _ How can he be this person, and the one who cheats on me? _

“Billy?” Riley says, unable to keep quiet any longer. “We need to talk.” 

“About what?” Billy asks.

“Whatever’s been going on with you since we landed. You keep checking your phone, and…when you went to bug the wine bottle, I saw the text. From Keila.” Riley tries to keep her voice even, like this is an interrogation of a suspect. 

Billy sighs, turning around. “Should have known trying to keep secrets from a spy was a bad idea.” He reaches into his pocket. “I promise, this will explain everything.” He pulls out a paper, starting to unfold it while dropping to one knee on the damp pavement. “Riley, will you marry me?” 

“Don’t…don’t people normally propose with a ring?” Riley asks, staring at the piece of paper. There’s a photo on it of a house. It doesn’t look familiar. 

“Well, I figure, I could have bought a fancy rock…or I could buy us the start of a whole new life together.” Billy holds out his phone. “Was keepin’ this away from you all night because of the texts with the real estate agent. I just closed on the place. She was telling me I needed to call and finalize some things with her once I’m back in the States.” 

“Billy…” Riley says softly.

“It’s not the prettiest, but it has its charm.” Billy pulls up a series of photos of a two-story mint green house. “The agent said the extra bedrooms could be for kids eventually, but I figure for now we could have office space.” His smile is broad and genuine. “I’m sorry for that text giving you the wrong impression. I meant for this to be something happy for both of us. Didn’t mean to have you thinking something was wrong.”

“Not that I’m not glad…but…Billy? I…I…we never discussed a permanent move. I’d have to quit Phoenix.”

“You know Momma has a job for you just waiting.” Billy smiles. “I just figured I’d surprise you.”

“I’m surprised.” Riley doesn’t really know what to say. “But…I wish you’d talked to me before you bought a permanent house.” 

“What’s to talk about?” Billy asks. “You said you were letting the lease on your apartment expire, I figured you were ready for a move.”

“A move…yes. But…I thought we discussed that I wasn’t ready to change jobs right now.”

“Didn’t you enjoy tonight?” Billy asks. “It’s not so different. The same rush, the same crazy hero stuff you love doing.”

_Yes, but not with the same people I love doing it _with. The shock hits Riley in a wave. No matter how much she loves Billy, she can’t turn her back on the team that became her family. She can’t leave them. It’s too much. It’s too fast. And…a life where she sees them on occasional weekends and video calls isn’t good enough for her. Not after everything they’ve been through, all the memories and everything they share. She can’t do it. 

“It’s not just the rush. It’s the people. My team is my family, Billy, you can’t ask me to walk away from them after all the time we’ve spent together, building our lives.” 

“I thought I was the most important thing in your life, Riley.” There’s a sting in Billy’s words. Riley feels it like a barb going into her heart.  _ My family is important to me too. I can’t leave Mac, and Jack, and the others. Especially not Mac. Not right now. _ He needs stability. He needs his big sister close. 

“I can’t say yes right now, Billy. I can’t.”

“Then that’s going to have to be a no.” He stands up, sighing. “Riley, I get that you’re commitment-shy. And I’ve waited for you. I’ve been patient. But you are never going to let that fear go, are you? Even if you said yes tomorrow, I’d know you didn’t mean it with everything you got.”

“I love you, Billy. I do. But…you can’t ask me to walk away from everything I know and everyone I love. Not like this.” Maybe if she’d had time to think…time to talk about this with everyone and find out how they felt…but if it happened once, it could happen again. Clearly Billy wants to be the decision maker in the relationship, about things like where they live and what they do. And Riley can’t see herself maintaining that.  _ I wish I’d noticed sooner.  _ “I’m sorry, Billy.”

“So am I, Riley. So am I.”

She chokes on her next words. It’s one of the hardest things she’s had to say in her life. “I know you can’t keep waiting for me, not when we don’t want the same things. This isn’t going to change, for me. I really hope you find someone out there who’s right for you, Billy. I do.”

“You too, Riley.” His hand rests over hers. “Maybe this just wasn’t meant to be.”

“M-maybe not.” Riley pulls her hand away, swiping the back of it over her face. “I’m sorry you invested all this time…”

“I’ve got good memories. And I guess I’m going to have to be okay with that.” 

She hands him the car keys. “Go on, I…I’m going to need a minute.” She can’t ride back with him in that stony silence. And there’s nothing left to say. 

“I don’t feel right leaving you out here.” Billy says. “It’s not safe.” 

Riley opens her purse and shows the gun inside. “Trust me, Billy. I took on an international terrorist tonight. I think I can handle myself.” 

Finally, he turns away, and she sighs, huddling down into herself, only realizing now that she’s still got his jacket. It smells like his cologne, and tears sting her eyes as she bites her lip.  _ What have I done? _

She can’t tell herself it was the wrong choice. She’s not going to go running back to him and make up and say she will marry him, she will go with him. That’s the movies, not real life. But…she’s sorry it ended this way.  _ He really did love me, and he wanted to spend his life with me. _ It’s just that beyond that…they wanted different things.

She’s not really aware of how much water is falling on her face until thunder cracks somewhere in the distance, and she realizes that’s not just tears.  _ Of course. It’s raining.  _ Riley sighs, bunches up her skirt, and starts to run. 

She’s soaked by the time she gets back to the hotel. She swipes into her room, grateful that she and Billy have adjoining suites and not a single room. She hangs up his jacket and her dress, showers quickly, and wraps her hair in a towel and herself in one of the hotel’s soft, fluffy robes. She catches a glimpse of herself in the mirror, her eyes look red and puffy and there’s no disguising the hurt. 

She sits down on her bed and picks up her phone.  _ Mom said to call her, whatever time it was. I hate to give her bad news in the middle of the night. But I need to talk to her. _ She can’t call Jack right now. He’ll want to do something. And it’s not Billy’s fault.  _ It isn’t anyone’s fault. Except maybe me not telling him just how important this family is to me. _ She knows Billy’s family is why he wanted to stay in Georgia.  _ Both of us are tied to our homes. And those are just too far apart. _

She hangs up twice before the phone rings through, unsure how she’s going to handle this, what she’s going to say. Diane’s voice on the other end is sleepy, but excited. “Riley?”

“It’s not good, Mom.” She leads with that before things can get any more painful. “We ended it.” 

“Oh honey.” Mom doesn’t say anything else, not for a long time. Riley doesn’t need her to. Anyway, she probably wouldn’t be able to hear it over the sobs shaking her.  _ It’s over. For good.  _

* * *

SAFE HOUSE

MATTY IS RUNNING OUT OF TIME AND PATIENCE

“Listen to me. The lives of a woman and her daughter depend on this.” Matty says. “You know me, Director. You know that I would never do something like this without a very good reason, and that I have a plan.” 

Director Huang frowns. “There are over a hundred agents on this list. Some of them in so deep we have no way to contact them. If you fail…”

“Then their deaths are on my head.” Matty sighs. They’ve been going around and around this for hours. Her former boss isn’t going to make this easy for her. Not by a long shot. He knows her and he knows all her tricks.

“Do you really think I would risk my career, my freedom, for this if I didn’t believe it was the right thing to do?” She looks the man straight in the eyes. “I promise you, so far as it is in my power, that list will stay safely out of the hands of any of these criminals. But I need the bypass codes. Because you know Galloway will know in a minute if they’re fake.”

She stops for a moment, and she can hear voices outside.  _ Ethan? _ It’s not an emergency, or he would have come to get her. But she doesn’t know what it could be.

“Excuse me, Director.” She steps out for a moment, closing the door behind her. Ethan is sitting in one of the kitchen chairs, tears streaming down his face. He’s speaking Greek. 

Matty’s heart skips.  _ Mac and Jack and Desi must have gotten Deena and Mara back. _ She wonders why Ethan didn’t tell her to stop the interrogation.

“Ethan?” She asks softly.

“They got Deena,” He says. “Mara wasn’t with her.” 

Matty resists the urge to try and put a fist through a wall.  _ Damn it, Galloway. _ She should have expected this. The man is smart. 

But seeing Ethan on the phone gives her an idea. “Ethan, please come in.” He follows her through the door. Director Huang looks up, frowning. 

“My people on the ground in Romania rescued Deena, Ethan’s wife.” Matty says. “But Galloway did what  _ we  _ taught him to do. He’d already separated her from Mara.” 

Ethan holds up his phone, a picture of Deena hugging Mara forms the lockscreen. 

Director Huang nods, and Ethan turns and steps out. Matty glances at the man.  _ Sometimes, we make the hard calls on ops by distancing ourselves from the humanity of the people we’re dealing with.  _ Being reminded of that, so devastatingly, seems to have worked. 

“You’re certain your people can stop that list from being used?” Director Huang asks.

“I’m staking my career on it. So yes.” Matty says. “I wouldn’t do this if I didn’t have a plan. You know me. And you know that recklessness was never my angle.” She knows he does. And hearing that Galloway is doing all this because of their agency, because of a mistake that the CIA made, has to dig. “I’m just trying to repair the damage I did a decade ago. I take responsibility for Galloway, and what he’s become. And now I’m taking responsibility to fix that.” She doesn’t break eye contact for a moment. “That list will be back in your hands tomorrow. All I need to do is borrow it.”

“Okay.” 

“One last thing.” Matty’s sure Galloway has an inside man. “I’m going to let call someone, as soon as those codes are in our hands, but I need another favor. Tell people you trust to be on the alert for incoming calls today that don’t happen on official agency lines. Make sure all of them are screened and traced. Galloway is most likely going to want to authenticate our story.” 

“You’re looking for a mole,” Director Huang says. “I assure you, my people will be watching.” She knows he wants this business cleaned up fast. He wasn’t a part of the original op where Galloway went missing, but now that he’s director, everything in his agency reflects back on him. An agent who turned up working for the enemy, and a potential mole, are both things he would like to solve as quickly as possible. 

“Thank you.” 

* * *

They’ve barely gotten Bozer from the airport to the safe house when the phone rings. Matty’s calling in, and when she tells Jack to grab a piece of paper, Desi knows she got the codes.  _ She’s good _ . 

When Mac pulls the phone out of his pocket, his hands are shaking just a little. Desi wonders if it’s stress or the awareness that once they do this, there is no going back. He enters each of the codes as Jack reads them off, and then the phone buzzes. Desi momentarily wonders if the Director lied, if he gave Matty codes that initiate a self-destruct or bring CIA tac teams down on their location. But then the screen blinks, and a set of files begins loading. Mac sets the phone down on the table fast, like it burned him. 

“I was one of the people on there,” Desi says, frowning at the phone, so deceptively small, with so many lives contained in those files. “You know, if this fails…” She shakes her head. “A lot of them are never going to be able to be contacted in time to stop a disaster. Deep covers sometimes drop contact with their handlers altogether.” She swallows. “They won’t know they’re compromised until they catch a bullet.” She picks up the phone, flipping it through her fingers.  _ One slip, one accident, and everything on here would be destroyed. _ She could do it. In a split second. 

“There’s still time to change your mind about being part of this,” Jack says. “I know you know some of those people.”

“I do. And every single one of them would sacrifice their lives in a heartbeat for Mara.” Desi says. “It wouldn’t even be a decision.” She sets the phone on the table. “If I was still under, if I was outed because of this? It’s the kind of sacrifice I signed on to make. I chose a life where I could be killed. Mara didn’t.”

“Theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die, huh?” Bozer asks.

“Are you seriously quoting Tennyson right now?”

“I’m nervous, okay?” Bozer says. “And it popped into my head.” He sighs. “Guess I should go get that mask prepped.” He sets a hefty-looking suitcase on the kitchen counter and opens it up, revealing a base form of one of his masks and an array of sculpting and painting tools. 

Jack lays down on the couch, an arm over his eyes. Probably trying to snatch a little sleep while he can. Desi wonders if she should do the same, although she doesn’t think she’ll be able to get her eyes to close at all. She glances at Mac, who’s fiddling with some gum and wires and other components on the table. Clearly, he’s too keyed up to sleep too. 

“Spark-gap generator?” She asks, sitting down. She built one in college, with some disastrous results.  _ Of course I did it during finals week.  _

“Yeah.” Mac says. “We can’t let that list get used. So as soon as we’ve made the exchange and Galloway’s authenticated it…”

“You’re going to turn it into a very expensive hunk of silicon and metal.” Desi says. She picks up a couple of the wires and twists them together. She knows what she’s doing, and it helps to have her hands busy, as long as she can’t sleep. Clearly, Mac was thinking the same thing. 

“Mac, get out of here.” She says. “Listen. I was under with a group in the area a few years ago, still got a stash site.” She pulls the scrawled map out of her pocket. “There’s money enough to get you anywhere you need to go, my fake passports won’t do you any good but I can give you the name of my forger, it’s on the back of this. As far as I know he’s still working.” She presses the scrap into Mac’s hand. “Tomorrow is on us. I’m going to try and make Bozer leave too. As soon as his mask is done. I can handle whatever Jack needs, and I know how to work one of these generators. We’ll make the exchange and find Mara. You have to go.” 

“I…” Mac’s hand closes over the map. “Desi, I don’t know…”

“Take it. It’s the best chance you’ve got.” 

“I can’t.” Mac says. “I can’t run while Jack stays and takes the fall.” He shakes his head. “I’m already implicated in all of this. If I run, I run forever.”

“And if you don’t, you spend the rest of your life in a cell. Or worse.” Desi sighs. “If not for yourself, for Bozer. He’ll go with you. I know he will.” If she has to resort to this kind of blackmail, she’ll do it. She doesn’t feel  _ good _ about using Bozer as a pawn to make Mac make a choice that protects him, but she feels better about it than she does about the idea of Mac going to prison. 

Mac looks up at her, eyes glimmering with unshed tears. “I don’t want to have to choose.”

“I know. But you know what Jack wants.” Desi says. 

There’s a chance, a small chance, that if she and Jack turn themselves in, take the fall, Mac and Bozer might be able to come home someday. And if not, she knows Riley is more than capable of dropping off the grid herself, finding her family, and laying low.  _ They’d look after each other. _ It’s not ideal, not by a long shot, but it’s better than Mac and Bozer spending the rest of their lives in prison. 

“Let me finish this. And let Bozer get his mask done.” She’s won. Mac’s giving in. And she’s sure Bozer will refuse to let Mac go on the run alone. She looks back over at Jack, knowing he’s still faking the snoring. 

It takes another hour before Bozer deems his mask prepared. Mac tugs him into a corner, and Desi tries not to listen to the whispered conversation as she starts coffee in the kitchen. She’s going to need it. 

Finally, Mac and Bozer both look at her. They walk over to Jack, who’s yawning and stretching, still, to a practiced eye, fakely. He pulls Mac into a tight hug and Bozer into a goofy handshake. “You kids take care of yourselves now.” His eyes are warm and stern at the same time. 

The door slams behind them and Desi hears the engine of the smaller vehicle start, leaving them the van to drive to the meet location. 

Desi looks at Jack. “It’s just us now.”

“Thank you.” Jack sighs, looking down at his hands. “I’m sorry I had to ask you to do that.”

“You’re a pushover, Dalton. Of course you never could have said no to him.” She gives him a weak smile.  _ This is it. This is how we go down. Together. _ The agency that they met in is going to be the reason they never see the light of day again. 

She looks down at the spark-gap generator on the table. Mac walked her through the plan four times, she knows what she’s going to have to do. She glances at Bozer’s mask. She got a crash course in that, too.

It feels weirder than it should to be doing everything mostly by herself. It’s what she’s done for literal years, but she was getting used to working with this insane little team. 

“Jack, go shave and wash your face. This polymer needs a pretty smooth surface to adhere to,” She says, reading down Bozer’s scribbled instructions one more time. “Skin oils will make it degrade faster.” 

Jack nods, and she can tell he’s tense by the fact that he doesn’t crack a joke about any of this. _ He would if Mac was here. Because he’d be trying to make Mac feel better. _ She hears his footsteps vanish into the bathroom, and she picks up the components of the spark-gap generator, hanging one piece around her neck and pulling off her jacket to conceal the antenna on her arm. 

Suddenly, she hears the sound of tires pulling into the driveway. She jumps.  _ No one should be here. This safe house is off even Phoenix’s radar. _

She pulls her gun and ducks behind the door. Shoes clump onto the porch, and someone reaches for the door handle. She grabs it first and points her gun in the face of the intruder.

“Uh…not really the welcome I was hoping for.” Bozer blinks owlishly at the weapon pointed at his face. Behind him, Mac looks both startled and slightly amused. 

“I almost shot you two, damn it!” She snaps. “Get in here.” 

“We talked about it, and we decided we can’t go.” Bozer says. “We’re family. Family sticks together.” 

“What do we have to do to get the two of you to leave?” Jack asks, emerging from the bathroom, patting his face down with a towel and scowling. 

“Short of handcuffing us in the basement, you can’t make us stay out of this. And even if you did, Mac would have us out of those in two minutes,” Bozer insists. 

Mac nods. He still looks kind of pale. But he also looks determined. 

Desi sighs.  _ Should have known it wouldn’t be that easy. _ “Well, what are we waiting for?” She asks. “Meet’s in two hours.” 

* * *

“Well, there we go.” Bozer says. “You’re all set. Just remember, Ethan Reigns doesn’t have a Texas drawl.” 

“I know, Bozer.” Jack can tell Bozer’s pretty nervous, that’s why he’s giving so much random advice.  _ Probably trying to pretend all he’s doing is directing a film shoot. _

“You think it’ll fool him?” Mac asks. 

“It’s not like he can check my height and weight,” Jack says. “It doesn’t have to fool him forever, just long enough to make the exchange and get Mara.”

“Hopefully it doesn’t rain,” Bozer says. “I still haven’t really perfected a waterproof polymer.” 

“Thanks for that.” Jack says. “Now I’m gonna have that on my mind.” He glances out of the one-way van windows at the abandoned stadium. 

He doesn’t like that Mac is going with him. But the kid wouldn’t take no for an answer, even when Desi insisted she was fully capable of going through with his part of the plan. 

_ “You need sniper cover. As long as she can do it, Desi might as well be up there.”  _

Jack watches her finish cleaning and assembling her rifle. She’s already done that twice. “You ready to get into position?”

Desi gives him a nod. “I’ll cover you. But you and Mac need to keep him from sending that list to his people.”

Jack nods. “I know how dangerous this is. Trust me.”

“I’ve got it.” Mac’s fingers are twitching restlessly, but his jaw is set and his eyes are steely with determination. Jack can see the slight lump under his shirt where part of his little invention is resting. _I’ve asked him four times to tell me that won’t short out and electrocute _him. Mac did have to take the dog tags off, and he looked more upset about that than anything else. He’d just started wearing them again. Now they’re stuffed in the pocket where his left hand is clenched into a fist. 

Jack climbs out of the van, and Mac follows him. He’s careful not to look in the direction Desi is going, finding a high place to get a vantage point from. He steps out from around the back of the stadium their coordinates indicated just as a black car pulls into the lot in front.

The man who steps out is only familiar to Jack from a few cursory glances in the halls. 

“You look good for a dead man, Galloway,” Jack says. Ethan was always a smart-mouthed bastard in the CIA days. He’s different now, but Galloway likely won’t know that. He’ll be expecting the man he remembers. 

“And you look pretty good for a traitor.” The man frowns. “You were supposed to come alone.”

Jack doesn’t like this. But he can bluff. “He’s my tech man. That list has more protection on it than just some passcodes, built into the files themselves, that only activates when they’re opened. You’re going to want him around to stop the GPS homing beacon, believe me.”  _ Actually, the only person who stands a prayer of getting behind that is Riley. She’s the one who wrote the original code. _ Jack hopes she’s going to stay safe and clear of all this. 

Galloway nods to the car. “Get in.” He hasn’t moved from where the door is shielding him.  _ He’s got his back to the spot he knows is clear, and he’s blocking the shot from just where Desi set up her position.  _

Jack bites back the urge to make a ‘secondary location’ joke (technically Bozer’s fault) and steps toward the car. To be honest, he was expecting this all along.  _ Galloway’s CIA, he knows providing a meet location beforehand means the target has the chance to prepare.  _ Jack’s done this exact same thing before. 

He hopes Desi explains this to Bozer, because the poor guy’s got to be freaking out right now. 

Beside him, Mac is shaking, but absolutely silent. Jack uses the edges of their jackets to let his fingers find the kid’s hand without anyone seeing.  _ It’s got to be weird for him, seeing me with someone else’s face.  _

They drive for almost twenty minutes before they reach a small parking garage and pull in. Jack trusts that Desi’s got their backs, even though Galloway used every trick in the book to make sure they didn’t pick up a tail. Desi is inhumanly good at sticking with a target and remaining unseen. 

They park, and Jack hears the click of several guns being readied. He steps out of the car with his hands up, slowly, and sees Mac doing the same. Galloway stalks around the car like a predator, frowning at Jack. 

“The list.”

“Not until I see Mara.”

“You don’t call the shots here. The list.” Galloway holds out his hand. Jack pulls the phone from his pocket and hands it over. 

“You’ll excuse me if I don’t believe you just yet.” Galloway steps away, pulling out his own phone.  _ He’s calling his inside man.  _ Jack hopes the CIA is prepared to nab their mole the minute they hang up. Matty said she’d been working on that part.  _ But that’s not on us, that’s on them. Our job is right here right now. _ He has to stay focused. 

Galloway turns back, with a sharklike smile. “Your story checks out. Someone did in fact steal the NOC list. And kidnapped Director Huang as well. Impressive.” He hands the phone to one of his men. “Begin uploading this.” He smiles. “Do you know what eight years in the CIA taught me, Reigns? I learned that whoever holds the information, holds the power. And now, I’m about to become the most powerful man in the criminal underworld. Whoever wants to know about what government plants are in their ranks will need to come to me.” 

“Okay, this is where my guy comes in,” Jack says. “He needs to disable the GPS system as soon as that phone comes online.”

“Fine, but there will be a gun on his back the whole time.” Galloway says. “Go ahead.”

Mac reaches into his pocket as he walks, pulling out a pack of gum. He jumps when one of the hired goons raises his weapon. “Hey, take it easy man. I work best when I got something to chew on. If you want some, you could just ask.”  _ Taking a page out of Riley’s book…and putting our little plan in motion at the same time. _ If they make it out of this, Jack’s going to have to tell her. 

The man glances from Mac’s hand holding the stick of gum, to the phone buzzing on the table. 

“It says the device is overheating. The upload is failing.”

Jack can tell the moment Galloway puts the pieces together. He’s already moving when the man’s gun comes up to point at Mac, grabbing the kid and tackling him to the ground, rolling them both under one of the cars. 

He slides out from under, jumping across the hood to take out one man, then grabbing his gun and shooting two more before the rest wise up and take cover. He has to be careful recklessly shooting at vehicles, Mara is most likely in here somewhere, close enough that Galloway could have eyes on her.

Suddenly, there’s the crack of a distance rifle, and Jack feels like standing up and cheering.  _ Way to go, Dez. _ He starts sneaking around the cars, knowing Desi’s going to have him covered. He takes out two more, or he thinks he does. He and Desi shot at the same time once.  _ She’s going to argue with me about that. _

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees movement. Galloway’s going for a car and as Jack watches, the man smashes out the window, reaching inside. Jack shoots, but the man ducks and rolls, pulling his own gun. Jack feels the burn of a bullet creasing his shoulder as he dives behind another car. He rolls to take cover behind the vehicle Galloway was after, then slips around to the side. He uses the mirror to push himself up on the roof and then get the drop, literally, on Galloway. 

The man’s gun goes flying, but he pulls a knife, trying to jam it into Jack’s throat. Jack keeps a tight hold on the man’s arm, rolling them over a couple times. The knife shakes with their combined exertion, and Jack lets go just as he rolls again. The blade embeds itself in the tire of the car beside them, and Jack lays Galloway out with a hard punch, standing up and panting. 

“I got Mara!” Bozer shouts. “She’s safe!” 

Jack leans forward with a sigh.  _ Oh thank God. _

“Anyone who’s not dead surrendered,” Desi adds, walking up and slinging her rifle over her shoulder. “Mac and I have them ziptied to the support pillars, they’re not going anywhere.” She glances at Jack’s arm. “Looks like you picked up a stray bullet.”

“I’ve had worse.” Jack turns to look for Mac, and sees the kid leaning against one of the cars. As he watches, Mac slides bonelessly to the pavement, wrapping his arms around his knees and shaking. Jack races toward him, ignoring the pain as he crashes to his knees beside the kid. 

“Mac, it’s fine. You’re okay. And so are all those agents.” Jack rests his hands on Mac’s shoulders before he remembers he’s still wearing the Ethan mask. He yanks it off, so Mac can see his real face; if the kid’s having a panic attack, the familiarity is going to be needed. 

“Hey, your homemade spark gun thing worked perfectly.”

“Spark-gap generator,” Mac says. “I know you knew that.”

“Had to make you think.” Jack says. “Now tell me again how it works?”

Mac swallows, but continues talking. “When I pulled the gum out of my pocket, the foil acted as a conductor and completed the circuit that powered the spark-gap generator. It fried the battery in the phone.”

“Nice.” Jack says. “You calmed down enough to breathe now?” Mac nods.

“Yeah. I think…” He trails off as several black vans screech into the parking garage, burning rubber as they slide to a halt. Jack sighs and lowers his head.  _ CIA. The minute the list went online it triggered the alert to our location, and Mac of course didn’t actually stop it. _ He’d be willing to be there was already a ground team looking for them. 

This is it. They got this far. They saved Deena and Mara. And now, they’re going to pay for it.

Mac begins hyperventilating again, undoing all Jack’s good work. Jack knows there’s nothing he can say to make this better. They’re coming for all of them. A half a minute from now, Mac’s going to be shoved to the ground and locked in cuffs. Probably separated from Jack for the rest of his life. So Jack just lets the kid curl into him, latch his hands into Jack’s shirt, and cry. It’s only for a fraction of a moment, before Mac pulls back, wipes his face on his sleeve, and then struggles to his feet. Jack helps him stand.  _ If he’s going down, he’s at least going to show them he’s strong.  _

Tac team members pour out of the first van. But the one in the lead stops, lowering their gun and removing a helmet that allows a cascade of brown ponytail to fall down the back of the suit. 

“Sarah?” Jack asks. 

“I should have known you were involved somehow, Jack.” Sarah says, holstering her gun, and motioning for the rest of the team to stand down as well. “As soon as someone stole the NOC list, my Jack senses were tingling. But I kept telling myself you’d never do anything that stupid.” 

“Seriously, we worked together for three years. You should know my stupidity potential is infinite.” Jack shrugs. 

“Then they pulled flight manifests, and you showed up in Langley and then Romania. And I volunteered for the team headed to find you. Once we connected Reigns to Webber, it was only a small jump from her to you.” 

“I guess you’re here to arrest us for treason now.” He holds out his hands. “You know, I used to wish you’d put me in handcuffs.”

“Gross.” Sarah says. “I’m a married woman, Jack Dalton.”

“I know.” He chuckles. “Just saying.” 

“Well, I’m afraid your little fantasies will have to remain unfulfilled,” Sarah says. “Thanks to you, we have the locations of every member of The Black Dragon. We also have one of our own that I’m sure everyone would be more than happy to see behind bars. I’m sure Director Huang would be willing to make a deal.” She says. “Unless you’re dead set on being flown home in cuffs. But I’ll let Lou here put them on you if you are.” She nods to a tall, burly guy beside her, still in his tac helmet but with a visible thick scar on his left cheek.

“Thanks, I’ll pass.” 

* * *

THE WAR ROOM

IT’S GOOD TO BE BACK

Matty smiles as her team and Ethan crowd into the War Room. 

“I honestly didn’t expect us to be coming back,” She says, glancing at Patty, who’s standing mock-sternly in the front of the room, glaring at them all. 

“Thought you were going to avoid the scolding, clearly.” Patty shakes her head. “You’re the last person I expected to go rogue on me.” She raises an eyebrow. “Now Jack, he gives me grey hairs and knocks another year off my life at least once a month.” 

She looks at Mac and Bozer. “Quite frankly, I feel like the both of you should be grounded for sneaking out. What were you thinking?” Matty can tell Patty’s masking real concern with that joke. She cares a lot about Mac and Bozer, and she clearly hopes she doesn’t have to see Mac behind bars again.  _ This time she wouldn’t have been able to save him.  _

“We saved Deena and Mara, that’s the important thing,” Mac says, his voice still shaking slightly. Clearly he doesn’t totally trust that office politics will be enough to keep him out of prison. “I couldn’t sit by and watch; if they’d died I would have felt responsible.”

Matty files away a note to self to make Mac go see the counselor sooner than his next appointment.  _ We’ve got to do something about the way he feels like everything is his fault. _ She’s been trying for years, but clearly, it still hasn’t sunk in. 

“There will be consequences for this little stunt.” Patty says. “I’ve assured Director Huang that everyone involved in his kidnapping and the ‘borrowing’ of the NOC list will be appropriately punished. There’s a large backlog of paperwork with your names on it.”

“Oh, come on, that falls under cruel and unusual punishment for sure,” Jack says. 

“Most of it happens to be yours, Dalton.” Patty shrugs. “Director Huang would prefer that what happened with Galloway never reaches further than the circle of us who know the truth. In exchange for that never leaving this room, he’s willing to drop the charges for kidnapping and treason.”

“So we just pretend the whole thing never happened?” Desi asks. 

“Exactly. Although Director Huang would prefer that you also avoid any further incidents with his agency. His exact words were, ‘If I ever see your people again, it’ll be too soon’.” She looks around the room. “You all collectively used up your get out of jail free card. Pull something like this again, and I won’t be able to help you.”

“What about Riley?” Bozer asks. “She wasn’t here, does she still get to do one treasonous thing for free?”

Patty groans and rests her face in her hands. Matty shakes her head. Jack is chuckling.

“I hope I never find out.” She sighs. “Do any of you realize how many favors I had to cash in to get you all off the hook?” She looks up at them. “Why are you all still standing here? Go on, get out of here before I decide to make your punishments a whole lot worse.”

Matty hears a softly muttered, ‘remind me why being Oversight sounded like a good idea’ as the door closes behind her. 

Mac, Jack, and Bozer are halfway down the hall already, planning a Mission Impossible marathon. Matty wonders if she should tell them to get some paperwork done while they’re watching, but decides against it. They did well, they deserve one night off. Just because she’s going to be taking work home with her, doesn’t mean they have to. 

“Thank you, Matty.” Ethan says, stepping up behind her and resting a hand on his shoulder. He and his family will have to move, again, but this time, hopefully, there will be no one tracking them down. Adam Carlisle, the dirty CIA agent Galloway was working with, is safely behind bars. 

“Stay safe, Ethan.” She means it. More for his family than for him.  _ They didn’t deserve this. _ When Deena and Mara got off the plane, she’d seen the fear in their eyes.  _ It hurts when I watch my own team get back from ops with that kind of trauma. They at least signed on for it. Deena and Mara had no choice. _

“I will.” He turns back to the door. “And tell the boss thank you for me too. I was a little too much in shock to say anything.” Matty nods. Ethan had been fully prepared to turn himself in for the kidnapping and theft in exchange for getting the others’ records cleared, he’d told Director Huang as much before they let the man go. 

“Go home to your family. They need you.” Matty watches him walk out the door. 

Desi is still in the hall, clearly trying to decide if she wants to ditch work and spend the night with the movie marathon, or be a good little drone and go get a jumpstart on her paperwork. Matty knows it’s been taking some getting used to, having a team that will actually bend rules and be unproductive sometimes. But it’s slowly wearing away some of the robotic persona Matty had been horrified to see when Desi went out on ops.  _ The agency broke her. Made her into a weapon instead of a person. _ She saw the same thing in Jack, fresh out of the military. 

She walks up slowly. “Is everything alright?”

Desi shrugs. “If I ever show my face in another CIA building, I’m getting cuffed, but hey. Small price to pay for doing the right thing.” Matty’s sure it stings, being told off by the same agency she just left.  _ She still feels some loyalty. And I’m sure risking the NOC list hit really close to home. _

“You know I wouldn’t have done what I did if I didn’t trust all of you to come through, right?” she asks. 

Desi nods. “I know. I’ve never seen you do anything without a good reason and a plan.” She shakes her head. “Besides, I wasn’t going to let Jack go get himself killed without me.”

Matty smiles. “He told me what you tried to do for Mac and Bozer.”

“They should never have been with us.” Desi picks at the teal nail polish on her thumb. 

“Unfortunately, when it comes to this team, I’m afraid it’s a thankless task trying to keep the rest of them from following one of them into an insane scheme.” Matty learned that the hard way too many times. “And you’ve made it very clear that you fit right in.”

Desi looks down at the floor. “I don’t walk away from people in trouble. And I’ve never had a problem with that.”

“None of us do.” Matty says. “It’s something I’ve learned to love about working with the Phoenix. Taking jobs no one else will, because it’s the right thing to do.” Matty glances at Desi, meeting her eyes under the fringe of black hair falling over them. “I know you’re still questioning your place here, and your place with them. But after what I’ve seen the past few missions, I have no question at all about where you belong.” She smiles. “Now go on, you don’t want to miss the beginning of  _ Mission Impossible _ .” 

* * *

DIANE’S APARTMENT

“It’s official. My taste in men is absolutely hopeless.” Riley feels like a heartbroken teenager, curled up on her mom’s couch with three pillows, under her fleece Black Panther blanket, with a mug of Jack’s classic slightly spiked cocoa in her hands. 

“Oh honey.” Diane sighs, leaning over to run her fingers through Riley’s hair. “Join the club.” She sighs. “I’m so sorry it happened like that.”

“I wish he’d asked me,” Riley says. “We could have talked about it.” She swallows, then takes a sip of her cocoa. “I feel horrible for letting things get this far and then dumping him.”

“It’s better than getting married and having regrets down the road, believe me.” Mom says, starting a braid at the edge of Riley’s temple. “It’s not that the people who wind up causing you grief change, really. I happen to think the seeds of that are already there. I didn’t see Elwood drunk much before we got married, but the few times he got that far, it was because he was frustrated or angry. Usually when he was watching a game with his buddies and it didn’t go his way.” She sighs. “I should have known he’d turn to drinking when things got tough. And that he was an angry drunk. I could have saved you and me a lot of grief.”

“Do you regret it?” Riley asks.

“Sometimes I want to. But I got you.” Diane says. “My beautiful child, who I would never change for any life in the whole world.” She sighs. “Sometimes I wonder if there was something I could have done differently, and I have to remind myself his choices were on his head, not mine. Which is exactly what you need to remember now. What happened in Paris is not your fault. You were not stringing that boy along without intending to commit. You talked to me about this, you were prepared to get engaged. He just sprung that move on you without a conversation.” She frowns. “And I don’t mean to speak ill of the boy, but that could easily turn far more controlling in the future. I think it’s for the best that he’s learned a lesson. Maybe he’ll think on that and mature a little.” 

Riley sighs. “Do I attract men who assume I’ll be okay with whatever they do as long as they think they’re doing it for the right reasons?” Nick clearly thought she’d take him back in a heartbeat once she found out he was undercover for the CIA.  _ Do I seem like a pushover? _ She doesn’t think she gives people that impression. But now she wonders. 

“Oh, honey, no. I told you, this isn’t your fault.” 

“I’m just scared. I don’t mean it to sound wrong, but…”

“But I’ve had way more than two disastrous relationships.” Diane smiles sadly. “No need to try and sugarcoat it, Riley. You were there for all of it. Probably harder on you than on me, if we’re being honest.” 

“I just…I don’t know if I did the right thing.” Riley sighs. “He did love me.”

“But he didn’t understand you.” Mom says. “He didn’t really know you at all, if he thought it was gonna be easy for you to walk away from your family.” Riley nods, tears still rolling down her cheeks. “I know it hurts right now, but the truth is, I think you were right. If he wanted you to change who you are to have a life with him, then that’s not a healthy place to be.” 

Riley sighs, twisting a corner of the blanket. “I know. But…I just wish I hadn’t had to choose.”

“Maybe someday you won’t.” Mom says. “I know Jack would never have given up you kids to marry me. But he didn’t have to.” She smiles. “He found a way to have both me and you in his life. And I’m very glad that he did. It just…took him a while.” 

“I just wish there was an easy way to know.” Riley sighs. 

“I wish there was too. There’s no blinking neon light over their head saying ‘this is the one’,” Diane chuckles. “That would have saved me a lot of heartache for sure.” 

Riley nods.  _ At least she and Jack finally got their act together. Because he’s the dad I always wanted.  _ “Can you drive me over to Mac’s? I don’t think I should be behind the wheel right now. But I think I need to talk to Jack.” 

* * *

MAC’S HOUSE

THIS COUCH ISN’T BIG ENOUGH FOR THE FOUR OF THEM.

“I was here first,” Bozer says, glaring at where Desi stole his seat on the end of the couch, her legs kicked up over the armrest. Jack chuckles at Bozer’s attempt at a death glare.  _ He should stick to masks. His acting still needs a little bit of help. _ At least in this case. 

“So?” Desi asks. “This spot was empty when I got here.” She leans back with an exaggerated sigh, colliding with Jack’s shoulder. 

“Because I was making popcorn!” Bozer insists. “And not any of that processed microwave crap.  _ Real _ popcorn.” He holds up a bowl mounded with buttery-smelling white fluff. Jack reaches for it, and Bozer hops out of reach. “Not until I get my seat back!” He plops down in one of the single chairs and crams a handful of popcorn in his mouth. “I don’t share with couch-thieves. Or anyone who enables them.” 

“Enabling?” Jack asks. 

“You could kick her off there.” Bozer shoves in another handful.

“Dude, you think I want to start something? She could wipe the floor with me if she really wanted to.” Jack says. Desi grins at him.

“Like I said, no popcorn for any of you until I get my spot back.” Bozer says. “Except Mac. Clearly, he’s a neutral uninvolved party.” Mac is on the opposite end of the couch, watching everything with the kind of rapt attention Jack knows the movie won’t manage. 

Desi appears to consider. Jack knows she likes her salty snacks, and he also knows the chip bag tucked between her legs and the arm of the couch is almost empty.  _ She won’t make it through the opening credits with what she’s got left. _

“You know, I could just steal that bowl from you.”

“Which would involve you getting up from the couch, and thus provide a vacant seat.” Bozer holds up the bowl. “Be my guest.”

“Oh, you think you can play musical chairs better than me? Be  _ my  _ guest.” Desi jumps up, and so does Bozer. Jack can’t help it anymore, he starts laughing, watching them pursue each other around the room. Desi’s trying to defend her position while getting her hands on the popcorn bowl, and Bozer keeps tripping over Mickey, who’s following him around in the hopes of snapping up any spilled popcorn. 

“Oh this is way better than watching Tom Cruise hanging from the ceiling,” Jack manages to choke out between laughs. “ _ Mission Impossible 7: Operation Popcorn _ .”

Suddenly, Mickey barks, and Jack realizes someone is knocking on the door. Since Bozer’s still fighting with Desi, he reluctantly gets up and walks over, checking through the glass before opening it.  _ Don’t need a random baddie crashing the party. _

“Riley?” Jack asks. He doesn’t need to say anything more, he can tell from her face that Paris didn’t go well.

“Hey Jack.” She’s trying to smile, but he can see a small line of cocoa foam on her upper lip, and tears glistening in her eyes. She never drinks hot chocolate this early in the day unless it’s bad. 

“Hey, kiddo.”

“I hear I missed some high treason.”  _ Matty must have contacted her. Or Patty. _ Jack feels terrible that his phone was on mission mode for the past couple days.  _ She might have wanted comfort and I wasn’t there for her. _

“Good thing, too. We almost didn’t get off the hook this time.”

Riley shrugs. “Sounds better than my weekend.” Jack doesn’t speak, just waits for her to come out with it. “Billy and I broke up.”

“Oh baby girl, I’m so sorry.” Jack knows she was head over heels. And he was happy for her.  _ Sure, I thought she deserved the perfect man, and he wasn’t, but…there is no perfect person, really. And he made her happy. And I thought he loved her too. _ He knows Riley wouldn’t have broken up with him unless something was really bad. “Do I have to get my gun and an alibi?”

“No.” Riley shakes her head, smiling through the tears starting to slide down her face. Jack’s glad, for her sake, that the living room is still a war zone, no one is listening in on their conversation. “He asked me to marry him.”

Jack doesn’t follow. How that caused a breakup instead of an engagement is anyone’s guess. But he also knows better than to ask questions. Riley will tell what she wants, when she wants. 

“He’d bought a house, Jack. In Georgia. He wanted me to move there with him.” She swallows. “He hadn’t asked me about that.” She sniffs. “I just…I couldn’t. I wanted to marry him, I really did. But…” Jack waits, letting her get her choked crying under control. “I realized there was something I wanted more than that,” Riley says, sniffing back her tears. “I wanted this family.” 

“Oh kiddo.” Jack says. “Come here.” 

He holds her for a long time. Long enough for Bozer and Desi to realize something’s wrong. For Mickey to run up and nuzzle at Riley’s leg. For Mac to hover, worried but shy, on the fringes of what’s happening.

“I don’t want to talk about it, I just want to move on.” Riley finally says. “What were you doing?”

“Celebrating not getting disavowed with a  _ Mission Impossible _ marathon.” Jack nods toward the TV. “Want to join us?”

“Mom’s in the car…” Riley trails off.

“Well, tell her to come in! We got room. And popcorn.” Jack nods to the bowl still securely in Bozer’s hands. There’s less of a mound than there was, but it’s still plenty.

Desi and Bozer both tacitly take chairs. Mac perches on the arm of the couch next to Jack, Riley plunks herself down in the middle, and Diane takes the other side. Bozer hands Riley the bowl of popcorn, and Mickey curls up at her feet, probably thanks to a combination of wanting to soothe the distressed person and wanting to profit from the holder of the popcorn bowl. 

Jack leans over, grabs the remote, and presses play. “Okay, who’s ready for some good old-fashioned totally inaccurate spy adventures?” 


	23. History+Cable+Choices

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, here we are, the season finale. As you will note, the title is different, and so are several other things throughout the course of the story. I'm trying a new technique with mini flashbacks inserted directly into character POVs, and if you could let me know if it works or is too jarring, I'd appreciate it!

###  322-History+Cable+Choices

THE SANDBOX

2006

_ “Hey Swiss, you almost done?” Jack asks, leaning his rifle on the windowsill.  _

_ “Five more minutes!” Charlie calls back, sounding a little breathless. _

_ “If you weren’t the best damn bomb nerd I’ve ever met, I’d be high-tailing my ass back to base right now, you know that?” Jack calls back, then chuckles when he can  _ sense _ Charlie giving him the middle finger. They’ve been working together for four months and Jack has learned plenty about his new bomb nerd, from the kid’s quirk of licking his lips while he works to his obsession with Momma’s chili brownies she sends in her care packages.  _ I’ve actually had to ask her to double up on them.  _ Jack’s other EOD techs took one bite and left his stash alone, but Charlie would probably eat the whole box in an afternoon if he could.  _

_ He readjusts his sights, hoping to catch the other sniper the second the guy shows a gun barrel. They’ve been playing cat and mouse all over this town. Jack took out a couple of less skilled guys, but this one sniper is proving to be a reasonable match for his skills. _

_ He wants to get back to base, get the sand out of his uniform, and maybe for once this month get a reasonable amount of sleep before getting called out again in the morning.  _

_ He’s tired of this. Of the endless desert and the endless bombs. Of watching guys he’s grown to like, friends he’s made, drive off one morning and never come back. He’s tired of looking over his shoulder and waiting for the day it’s him instead of them. But he can’t bring himself to leave when there are kids like Charlie here, kids who deserve someone good watching their back. Besides, it’s not like he’s got much to go home to. He can’t go back to the ranch and face Pops right now, not after that fight they had last time he was home. He knows it’s all forgiven but he also knows that some part of him had acted like a spoiled teenager who wasn’t getting his way.  _ But I didn’t want to think we might lose the ranch. Or even part of it. _ He knows Uncle Bill was never all that fond of the life, but the least he could have done was sign over his part of the land to Pops. Instead of planning to sell it.  _

_ Pops wrote him two months later and told him Uncle Bill had reconsidered. And with the time to cool down, Jack had realized he’d been foolish. Pops’s slow, steady determination had accomplished a lot more than Jack’s sharp anger ever would. Pops didn’t lose his temper the way Jack did, and that’s probably the only thing that saved the ranch.  _

_ Jack shakes his mind out of the thoughts of more sand, a different sort of dry wind, wind tinged with sage and mesquite instead of gunpowder and sweat. He’s got a job to do. Charlie’s almost done, and then they can get the hell out of here.  _

_ “Hold up your hands, or I will shoot.” There’s a click from behind him, and Jack sighs. He raises his hands slowly.  _ Damn it. _ He must have given away his location. And while he was hunting their rogue sniper, the man was hunting him. He let himself get distracted, and now he’s going to pay. _

_ Jack turns around slowly.  _ If he wanted to shoot me, he’d have shot me. He wants me alive for some reason.  _ Maybe his reputation for keeping EOD techs alive has preceded him.  _ These guys don’t like people who disarm their bombs, but they also don’t like people who help the process.  _ Jack figures there’s a pretty painful future in store. _

_ And then the door creaks open a little further, and both he and the sniper stare at the third person in the entrance.  _

_ “Drop the gun.” Charlie says. “Or I drop you.” He holds up the wad of putty and wires. “Your buddies left these all over town. You know what they do.” He raises an eyebrow. “So if that gun goes off, I drop this, and we’re all toast, along with half this block.”  _

_ Jack’s pretty sure this guy is the sort who, on reflection, would rather go out and take a few of his enemies with him. But it is taking him a second to  _ make _ that decision. He’s not a suicide bomber, he didn’t come out planning to die today. And that second of distracted decision making is all Jack needs. He’s ripping the gun out of the man’s hands and laying him out cold on the floor before the guy realizes what’s happening.  _

_ “Nice.” Charlie says.  _

_ “Thanks for the save.” Jack can feel the adrenaline crash that always follows a near-death experience. “But what were you  _ thinking?”

_ “That my partner was in trouble and I’d better do something about it or I’d have to find a new overwatch. I was just getting used to you, you know.” He shrugs. “It’s tough breaking in a new guy. Besides, no one else gets chili brownies in their boxes from home.”  _

_ “You scared the hell outta me, Charlie.” Jack shakes his head. “What if he’d have shot you?” _

_ “You’ve got my back, I’ve got yours.” Charlie shrugs. _

_ “By blowing us all up if he didn’t cooperate?” _

_ “I’d already disarmed it. The compound is shock-stable, those wires were just for show.” Charlie chuckles. “In my experience, the guys who tote guns around aren’t all that knowledgeable about the fine points of the things that go boom.” He gently punches Jack’s shoulder. “Had you going too, see?” _

_ “Man, if I didn’t owe you one, I’d sock you in the jaw,” Jack says with a weak grin. “First you scare me, then you insult my intelligence.” He shakes his head. “Let’s go home, huh, Swiss?” _

* * *

PRESENT DAY

PHOENIX JET

“Okay, truth or dare, Desi?” Riley asks. She’s just managed a successful backflip in the aisle between seats. 

“Truth.” Desi chuckles. “We’re running out of dares we can do at twenty-five thousand feet. Unless someone wants to wing-walk.” Riley shakes her head pre-emptively at Jack before he can suggest the plan. 

“What does the writing on the tattoo on your chest say?” Riley asks. 

“ A Light That Never Fades Away . In Vietnamese.” Desi traces the edges of the words with one finger. “Got it about eight years ago. I was under for a year and a half and it was the longest I’d ever done before. I barely knew who I was when it was over and got stateside. I was having trouble coping, trying to put back all the pieces into some kind of functional human being. But the things I’d seen and the things I’d done…” She sighs, spinning an empty chip bag around on the table in front of her. “I couldn’t tell anymore if I was one of the good guys at all.” 

She stops for a long minute, and no one says a thing. 

“And then I saw that phrase, somewhere, and it just…it meant something to me. That somewhere under all the things I’d done, under everything I’d become, there was still something that made me…me. So I got that tattoo to remind me that no matter what I did, no matter who I had to be, there was still going to be a part of me that was never going to change. The real me. A little spark somewhere. Every morning when I look in the mirror, no matter who I see looking back at me, I see that reminder too. That I’m more than what I make myself. I’m more than who anyone else has made me. And sometimes a reminder like that is the only way to make it through a day.”

She looks at Mac when she finishes talking, and Riley sees that his eyes are locked on her. _That hits home for him. _Riley knows Desi didn’t have to tell the whole story. _I only asked what it said. Not what it _meant. But she can see why Desi wanted to share that. _She’s had a front row seat to some of the worst of Mac’s past. She needs him to know he’s not alone._

“I’m going to get something to cover up the…um, this scar,” Mac says quietly, a hand hovering over the left side of his chest where Riley knows the ugly gashed ‘M’ is. “I…for a while I never even considered ever having one. The…the only people I knew who had tattoos were cartel or gang members and guys inside. It didn’t mean anything good to me.” He takes a shaky breath. “And then I met Jack and Riley, and they both had ones that meant something important to them, and it didn’t bother me to see those.” He gives Jack a tiny smile. “So…when this happened, and I found out there was a way to cover it up…I decided I actually did want one. Well, two, I have a wolf on my ankle like Riley.” 

Desi grins and makes a face. “Matching sibling tattoos, how cheesy. Alright, Jack,” she continues, playfulness bleeding back into her voice and chasing out the pain. “Truth or dare?” 

“Dare,” Jack says, with a devious smile.

“I’m not asking you to wing-walk.”

“Are you kidding? Remember that cover with the airshow?”

“I remember you almost dying.”

“Because that plane was held together with spit and shoestrings! No offense, Mac. It wasn’t your kind of shoestring build.” Jack says. His phone rings, and when he picks it up, Riley sees “Swiss” and Charlie’s picture pop up on screen. “Hey Charlie.”

The next second he flinches and puts it on speaker. 

A hideously distorted voice hisses over the line. “If you want to see your friend alive, be at the Ellison building in Los Angeles. One hour.” 

The call goes dead. 

“How long till we land?” Jack asks immediately. 

“Forty-two minutes,” Riley replies, glancing at the clock over the pilot’s door. 

“Ask them if they can push it.” Jack’s hands are gripping the arms of the seat, knuckles white. Riley nods.  _ Charlie, what happened? _

* * *

THE ELLISON BUILDING

TWO MINUTES ON THE CLOCK

Mac watches Jack pull his phone out the second they hit the lobby of the Ellison Professional Building and call back Charlie’s phone. When the person on the other end answers, Jack’s voice is a low, dangerous growl.  _ Whoever you are, you hurt the wrong person’s friend. _ Mac knows Jack will tear this guy apart if he ever gets his hands on them. 

“Okay, we’re here.” 

“Excellent. You’ll find your friend on the twenty-eighth floor.” The call ends, and Jack looks at Mac, then Riley. 

“Stairs.” Everyone nods, and they head for the staircase. Twenty-eight flights is going to suck, but not nearly as much as the ninety flights in Shanghai when they were trying to get to Ralph Jericho’s penthouse, and besides, being trapped in a booby-trapped elevator would suck  _ more. _

When they step off at the twenty-eighth floor, Mac can hear noises. Like a lot of people crowding into an area.  _ Oh no. Charlie can’t be dead, we did everything right… _ he follows Jack out into the hallway and immediately begins checking the area for a body.

There’s no body, but there are a lot of people standing around the elevator doors, and a couple workmen with prybars about to push the doors open. Mac’s brain slots the pieces together in an instant.  _ This is part of the game. _

“Stop!” Mac shouts. “Don’t touch that door. We’re federal agents.”

“Here for a stuck elevator?” The woman asks. 

“Here for a kidnapping case.” Desi’s voice doesn’t invite argument. “We’re looking for a black male, light brown skin, about six foot two, bald…”

“Hey, it’s shaved.” The voice is coming from inside the elevator. Weak and dazed, but definitely Charlie. “I could grow hair if I wanted to.”

“Hey, man, it is good to hear you.” Jack kneels down in front of the elevator doors. “Talk to me, Charlie. How you doin’?”

“Well, I woke up to hear someone insulting my hairstyle choices, so how do you think I’m doing?” Charlie asks with a shaky chuckle. “Seriously, though, I think I’m alright. Took one hell of a crack to the skull, but you always said I had a wooden head anyway.” 

Jack smiles a little. “You see anything weird about this thing, or should we start trying to get you out?” 

“There’s some wires on the glass in here. Looks like they’re attached to some sensors on the front panel, the one behind the doors you’re at now. First thing I noticed when I woke up, besides the insult to my head.”

“I was trying to help find you,” Desi insists, but Mac can tell she’s not actually offended. Neither is Charlie, They’re just doing what all three of them seem to do best, defusing a tense situation with humor.  _ A shame that won’t help with the bomb that’s probably in there. _

“You can take the guy out of EOD, but you can’t take EOD out of the guy, huh?” Jack says. 

“Pretty much. Second nature when I’m in unidentified trouble is to look for the bomb.” There’s a faint groan from the other side of the elevator doors. “And whoever set this one up did one hell of a job.”

Mac notices that at the word ‘bomb’ everyone around the area begins backing up. One woman reaches for her phone.

“Put that down,” Riley says. “You could set this thing off with a cell signal.” The woman gapes at her. “You want to call it in, go down to the street and walk a block away.” She points to a tall young man with an intern badge on his blazer. “Pull a fire alarm and start evacuating this building. Now. That’ll make sure everyone uses the stairs.” 

“Bozer, Desi, go help evacuate,” Jack says.  _ Good choices. _ Both of them are cool heads, and Desi is surprisingly calming when she needs to be. And the rest of them need to be here working on the immediate problem. 

The woman who first talked to them when they walked in glances at Mac. “Your friends are very persuasive and slightly terrifying. How do I help?”

“Give me some tools and follow everyone else out.” The workmen hand over their bags and make their way toward the stairs, but one stops and turns back. He’s probably early forties or so, with brown hair and a somewhat gruff look. 

“I was EOD for six years,” he says. “You need an extra set of hands?”

Mac looks from him, to Jack, back to the man standing in the hallway. 

“Sure thing, man.” Jack says. “Thanks for the offer.”

“Haven’t walked away from a bomb yet,” the man says, extending a calloused hand. “Will Barton.”

“Mac.” 

“Nice to meet you, Mac. What do you need?”

“Well, Charlie knows the doors are booby-trapped on his side, but he says it’s on the inner glass. We have to find out if these front ones are wired too, or if we can get them open and maybe get a look at what he’s seeing in there.” 

Mac flinches at the staticky feedback from his comms as he walks up to the heavy metal interior doors. They’re set to frequencies outside the normal ranges, so it’s less of a risk they’ll detonate the bomb. But he shuts his off anyway. This ringing in his ears from the fire alarm is annoying enough. 

Mac glances at the door, putting his face as close to it as he can to try and see around the edges. Will’s running a long, thin screwdriver from his bag very carefully up through the gap between the doors, checking for any kind of resistance that might mean they’re wired. He’s holding a small flashlight as well, pointing it up and in as he works, a frown of concentration on his face. When he’s done, he shakes his head.  _ All clear. _

Mac turns around. “We...ah...we don’t see any triggers on the doors. Riley?”

“There’s some kind of signal, I can’t ID it.” She frowns. “It’s a communication frequency.”

“Which would explain why my comms are going crazy whenever I get close to the doors.” Mac frowns. “You think someone’s waiting to set this thing off remotely?”

“If they were, they most likely would have done it already,” Mac says. Jack nods. 

“I think we should get these doors open.” Jack reaches for one of the prybars, and Mac helps him work open the doors, then jams the ends of the bars into the tracks to stop them from closing again. 

Inside, Charlie’s leaning against one of the sidewalls. He looks exhausted, and there’s a little blood on his head above one ear, but he’s still alive. Mac breathes a faint sigh of relief. For now, Charlie’s alright.  _ Aside from being trapped inside an elevator rigged to explode or something.  _

“I’ve been looking at those wires, and they go up,” Charlie says. “I think whatever device they’re connected to is on the roof of the car.”

“Okay,” Jack says. “Just hang in there, Charlie. Mac, you up for one more flight of stairs to see if we can find this thing?” Mac nods. He follows Jack to the stairwell and up the stairs. His legs are starting to hurt from all this climbing, but he sort of feels like he can keep going forever. Because he has to. It’s not the first time he’s felt this way, and he highly doubts it will be the last. 

Jack wrenches open the doors above the elevator, and Mac winces, pushing himself around the corner just enough to look over the edge. 

“Hey, kiddo, get back, I’m gonna look first, okay?” Jack says. Mac nods. He can’t stop thinking about the high-voltage tower. More to the point, he can’t stop thinking about what happened after. 

Jack leans out the door, and Mac takes a few steps back, trying to catch his breath and ground himself. 

“There’s definitely something out there. I’m gonna climb down and take some pictures, okay?” Jack says. “I won’t touch anything. But you don’t have to go look at it yourself.”

Mac nods. If the pictures seem to indicate he should see this thing in person, then he’ll go down. But he appreciates Jack doing this for him.

He comes back in a few minutes, holding out his phone. Mac takes one look and cringes.  _ A cable cutter. _ And there’s a timer on it. Mac’s brain adds on the time on the digital clock to the hour and minute on his phone. The cutter is set to go off at noon. And there’s something else attached to it, something that Mac thinks looks an awful lot like a brick of explosives. He zooms in on the photo.  _ I really wish I’d been wrong.  _

Jack raises an eyebrow. “Correct me if I’m wrong, Mac, but I don’t think those devices come standard on elevators.” 

“No, they do not.” Mac looks up at Jack. “I think we need to go ask Charlie what he knows about what’s going on here.”

* * *

RILEY CAN’T WAIT UNTIL THIS IS JUST ANOTHER CAMPFIRE STORY

“Okay, well, I guess I should start at the beginning.” Charlie leans on the side of the elevator. “I got a call that there had been a bomb threat at City Hall. There was a suspicious bag left in the building, and LAPD sent a bomb robot in to check it out. The bag was empty, but when a couple techs went inside, there was an explosion anyway.” Riley frowns.  _ Someone must have hidden a bomb somewhere else. Maybe a transparent one, like the ones we ran across at Western Tech. _ If their Russian sleeper agent found people with the skills to create that once, then she’s sure the formula could either have been sold or replicated.  _ Unless he had another partner. But why wait all this time? And why target Charlie of all people? _

“How did that happen?” Jack asks. 

“When I got to the scene, I was able to determine that the explosives had been planted in the robot itself.”

“Wait, someone booby-trapped an LAPD disposal unit?” Mac asks. 

“I know, this has the Ghost written all over it,” Charlie says. “But he’s in a secure prison right now, right?” Riley’s glad they sent Will to sweep the rest of the building for devices.  _ It was a logical move, since the cutter is communicating with something, but it also means he won’t hear anything he isn’t supposed to. _

“Yeah. I mean, I’ll call Matty and have her check that out right now, but he didn’t seem like he was going anywhere,” Jack says. Riley’s inclined to agree. Pena had seemed content to stay where they left him, she’d gotten the feeling he really did want to try to heal and reconnect with his daughter.  _ It’s rare to see something like that at the end of the day, for us. _ But it’s happened a lot since they brought Mac onboard.  _ Maybe there’s something about him, something about how he sees the potential in everything, that extends to people too. He sees the potential good in them, and sometimes he succeeds in making them see it too.  _

“Copycat maybe?” Bozer suggests; he and Desi got back only a minute or so ago, reporting that the building has fully cleared out.  _ Thank goodness for badge scan check-ins at the front desk. _ But that does make her wonder how their mystery baddie got Charlie past that desk clerk, and all the way up here, without getting caught on camera as more than a blurry shape emerging from the staircase with Charlie’s arm slung over his shoulder, then stepping into the elevator, and walking back out. Whoever he is, he’s  _ good _ . And that’s scary.

“Could be. Maybe he targeted Charlie and us looking for revenge for taking the person he admired out of play?” Jack asks. 

Riley tries not to think how badly things went the last time they went up against a copycat.  _ Mac got arrested, and a father went to prison for trying to avenge his son. _

-

_ Mac is shaking, he looks about three seconds from throwing up, passing out, or both. “Don't-don't-don't worry, Mac, we'll get you out of this. You hear me? I promise.” Jack holds him a little tighter. Then Riley hears tires on gravel. _

_ “They’re here.” Mac stumbles to his feet, heading into the house toward the door, and the rest of them follow. Diane is still sputtering, almost incoherently now, but Riley can’t do anything about that. Mac is shaking so badly… _

_ And then the door smashes down with a massive cracking thud, and Riley gasps as a full SWAT breaching team pours in. Two of them start clearing the whole room, and Diane screams. Mickey is barking, lunging at the grip Bozer has on his collar. But Riley only has eyes for what’s happening to Mac. Two of the men grab him, flinging him to the ground and twisting his arms behind him. He’s gasping, starting to cry. And all she can hear is her own voice, screaming, over and over, “Stop!” _

-

“Could be. But then why would someone go to all this trouble?” Charlie nods at the elevator. “About the time I was able to reconstruct the scene and figure out the blast came from the robot, someone cracked me over the head. Don’t know where they were or how they snuck up on me. Kinda seemed like they just dropped from the ceiling.”

“So we’re looking for Spiderman now?” Desi asks, then shrugs. “Sorry. Just trying to lighten the mood.” 

“Whoever it was, they got me out of there and to this elevator without anyone noticing. They’re good, I’ll give them that.” Charlie grimaces. “All of this, the decoy bombs, the trick setup, it just  _ feels _ like the Ghost. I know that’s impossible, but…”

“Maybe not,” Riley says. “Maybe he had a partner.” She’s been considering the possibility for a while.  _ He worked with Mac, when they were both vigilantes. _ Maybe, when he’d become a dangerous bomb-maker, he’d worked with someone else. Because to copy his style is one thing. To copy his work on such a detailed level…

“You think he could have?” Mac asks. “I would have thought he would have told us.”

“Maybe he couldn’t remember,” Riley says. “If they parted ways before he was caught, maybe his mind lost track of them. Matty did say his memory treatments seem to be progressing well. Maybe we should talk to him.”

“We don’t have time.” It’s over a two hour drive just to get to that blacksite. And they have less than an hour and a half before Charlie or very likely a lot of other people die. 

“I’ll call the site. Maybe they can ask one of the doctors to speak with him.” Riley swallows. “It’s worth a shot.” 

Charlie nods. “In the meantime, talk to me about what’s going on up there.”

“I’m gonna let Mac take that one,” Jack says. 

“Okay, well, we were able to force open the door above this one and get a look at the top of the elevator,” Mac says. “There’s a very sophisticated cable cutter on it, with a chunk of explosives attached that looks like it’s big enough to level half this building. And Riley noticed an outgoing signal, which means if we disarm the cutter, then we’ll most likely trigger a second bomb somewhere. She’s got a trace running on the signal now.” Riley nods. 

“I’m telling you, man, all of this has the Ghost’s MO.” Charlie says. “Three bombs, connected ones like the ones at your house…”

“I think someone’s going to a lot of trouble to frame him.” Mac says. “Maybe someone who  _ doesn’t _ know we took him out of commission. We made sure it didn’t get announced to the world; we did the same thing when we took in Murdoc a few years ago.” He frowns. “We just piggyback on their operations to catch the people who try to hire them. So it’s entirely possible that someone who doesn’t know we took the Ghost off the streets is trying to make this look like his work to throw a red herring.” 

“Almost wish it was him,” Charlie says. “Then at least we’d know who we were dealing with.” 

Riley’s computer chimes, and she opens it, checking what’s just come through. It’s her trace on the signal that was interfering with their comms. She was sort of expecting a location in the warehouse district. The upscale, historical hotel isn’t the usual for their garden variety criminals. 

“I know where the signal is connecting to. The Grand Ocean Hotel.” Riley says. 

“You think that’s where our mystery bombmaker is staying?” Bozer asks. 

“I’m not sure.” Riley frowns. “It’s not a monitoring signal, it’s just some kind of consistent pulsing burst. Like a link. It reminds me of the Ghost’s connected bombs at Christmas a couple years ago.”

“You think there’s a second bomb in that hotel?” Charlie asks. Riley nods.  _ This is getting worse all the time.  _

“Hold on, that’s where that entire South Korean diplomatic group is staying.” Jack says. “There was a bulletin about it out to all the agencies. I wonder if this is a hit in disguise. Someone counted on us just taking out the cable cutter, but didn’t count on Riley being able to find and track their signals.”

“Whoever this is, they’re copying the Ghost’s MO very, very thoroughly,” Mac says. “It’s worth checking into either way.”

“Matty’s on it, there’s a tac team being dispatched to the hotel as we speak.” Riley drums her fingers on the wall. She’s been able to adjust their comm frequencies to no longer risk overlapping the one the bomb is using, and they’re back in communication with Phoenix. She’s quietly brought Matty up to date on the situation, passing along Jack’s pictures to be sent up the chain and see if anyone can identify the work. 

Riley thought the scariest enemy they’d faced in this job was Murdoc. But somehow, the unknown is just as terrifying. They have no idea what this mystery killer wants, why he’s playing this game, why he chose them. So there’s no way to plan for what he’ll do next. 

She half-listens to Mac, Jack, and Charlie discussing options for separating these linked bombs. They can’t exactly take the elevator across town to the hotel, like they did when they brought the garbage truck to Mac’s house. Unless they can get the hotel bomb to this building, their little ‘speed of light’ trick won’t help this time.  _ How else are we going to disarm two bombs at the exact same time? _

“We have eyes on the device in the hotel. Basement level.” Tac team updates filter through the comms. Riley turns up her sound and switches input channels to cut directly into that feed. She can hear the boots clomping.

“Good. What are we looking at?”

When the picture comes through on her computer, she gasps.  _ I was expecting a bomb. Not this many barrels. _ It really is Christmas all over again.

-

_ Charlie leans against the back of the truck. “The problem is, I don't know how to work a garbage truck, and if I pull the wrong lever and engage the compactor, we could set the whole bomb off. We need to get somebody down here…” _

_ Bozer steps in, walking up to the hopper controls. “I drove a garbage truck one summer as research for a movie I was making. Trash Men Vs. Zombies.”  _

_ “Shocked I never saw that one in theaters,” Riley chuckles.  _

_ “You're a hater.” Bozer engages the levers and the back of the truck opens slowly. Riley gasps. That’s not six barrels, like Mac described finding in his basement. It’s twelve.  _

_ “I think it's time for you to get on your Hurt Locker suit, Charlie,” Riley says quietly. _

-

Riley can’t shake the memory of the blue barrels in the back of the truck.  _ I bet these are filled with the same thing. _ “Guys, take a look at this.”

“Damn.” Jack frowns. “Mac, is that…”

“Can’t tell without being there, for sure.” Mac frowns. “Riley, can you patch me in?”

A minute later he presses a finger to his ear. “You’ve got testing compound, right?” Mac managed to cook up a more stable version of what Jack jokingly calls his ‘bomb soup’, and now tac teams carry a small supply any time they go out on a bomb-related run. 

“Yes, and we just did a test. There’s no nitrogen contamination on them. Barrels say they’re sulfuric acid,” the tac team leader replies. “We’ve got someone about to draw off a sample to check.” 

“Did he just say sulfuric acid?” Bozer asks. “I didn’t think that blew up.”

“It doesn’t,” Mac replies. “Concrete is alkaline. Those barrels are packed all around the hotel’s supporting pillars. The bomb on them goes off, the acid dumps all over those pillars and eats through them, and the hotel collapses.” 

“That might…actually be worse.” Bozer looks sick.

Jack nods, and then his phone rings. He pulls out the phone and then grimaces, it must be whoever has Charlie’s phone. Riley pulls up her trace program, even though she knows it most likely won’t do any good. The call is being bounced around too much to pin it down, and the caller never talks for long.

This time is no exception. The distorted voice on the other end sounds sickeningly gleeful. 

“I see you’ve found my second bomb. Excellent work. Now, the choice is yours. Let the cutter do its work, the hotel stays standing. Disarm it, and all that will be left will be a pile of rubble. Disarm that bomb, your friend falls twenty-eight stories. Save him, or everyone in that hotel. And don’t even try to evacuate it. Or both devices go off.” The call ends with an ominous click. 

* * *

“Elevators have safety catches. If the cable gets cut, those should engage, right?” Bozer says. “I read about this for a movie, it totally ruined my plan to kill some guy with an elevator fall. Uh…sorry Charlie.”

Mac sighs, biting his lip. “Normally, Bozer, that would be true. But whoever did this is a pro. Sabotaged every failsafe mechanism on this one.” 

“What about a weld?” Jack asks. “Attaching the clamps to the track permanently.” 

Once again, Mac feels defeated.  _ I wish _ . “With the amount of time we have left, we can’t be sure anything we do would remain structurally sound once the full pressure of the elevator car was put on it.” 

“I think Jack’s onto an idea, though. Jam something in the tracks below it?” Riley asks. “Just let the cable snap but it won’t be able to move?”

Mac shakes his head. “The explosives on the car are connected to the cable, and triggered by the same mechanism as the cutter. If the fall doesn’t pull out the detonator…”

“Kaboom.” Jack sighs. “This…whoever made it is like an evil you.” He bites his lip. “Sorry. Just saying…they thought of everything we could do and planned for it.”

“All we need to do is get Charlie out of there, right?” Desi says. “What about the safety escape hatch on top? Don’t all elevators have them?” 

“The cutter and bomb are right on top of it,” Mac says. “Unfortunately.” It’s not that Mac doesn’t appreciate the attempts at problem solving. He’s actually really proud of his team, they’re  _ all  _ thinking outside the box, things that he’d have done himself…if they’d work.

“I don’t know if this is a good idea or not, but only the front of the glass was rigged, right?” Will asks. “How about sending someone down the outside of the building to cut the front out instead, and bring him out that way?”

“Found more sensors while you were sweeping the building,” Charlie says. Mac nods. The ones on the other panels were better concealed, but they’re there. Breaching the elevator car in any way will set the cutter off. “It was a good thought, though.” He sighs. “Jack, I gotta talk to you.”

Jack walks over, and Mac can see the worry in his eyes. It’s the same look he gets when he knows Mac is about to do something life-threateningly insane.  _ I see that a little too often, probably.  _

“Listen, man, I know you’re gonna do everything in your power, but…if it comes down to it, you gotta let me go.” Charlie’s voice is low and a little hoarse, and Mac knows he probably shouldn’t still be listening over comms. But he can’t  _ move _ to turn his off. 

“Not an option, man. I promised you I was gonna bring you home, and I still mean it. Whether it’s the sandbox or this glass box.” 

“I became an EOD to save lives, Jack. Always knew it might get me killed.” Charlie laughs weakly. “Made it longer than some, which I’m grateful for. But…you can’t trade everyone in that hotel for me.”

“We’re not trading anyone,” Jack says. “We are  _ all _ going home at the end of the day, you hear me?” Mac knows that hurt in his voice. It’s the same desperation he remembers in his own as he tried to plead with Zoe Kimura to listen, to wait, to give him a chance to think of some way to save them all. 

“But if we don’t, I’ve made my peace with it. Don’t make me live with the alternative.” Charlie says. Finally, Jack nods, and turns back to the others.

“Where are we at on ideas?” He asks.

“Something that call said got me thinking.” Riley holds up her rig. “He said I  _ see  _ you’ve found my second bomb. I think he took another page out of the Ghost’s book and has eyes on us. So I started scanning for the same communication frequencies the devices are using to connect, and found a different one that’s carrying a video feed, from both here and the hotel. Both signals are connected to a central command center,” Riley says. “It’s bouncing off a lot of towers but I’ve got a program running to try to triangulate the third position. If we can find whoever made this, then maybe we can make him shut it down.” 

“Okay, keep on it. Mac?”

Mac’s wracking his brain for ideas.  _ It’s Schrodinger’s bomb. If the elevator doesn’t fall, it goes off. If it does fall…then it’s not the bomb that kills Charlie.  _ Which makes Charlie Schrodinger’s cat…at least for another half-hour. Mac tries to force down the panicked giddiness.  _ Think. _

He looks up at Riley, and motions to her to come over, close enough that he can whisper. “That feed going out from here. Is it just visual, or is there audio?”

“As far as I can tell, all the cameras in the building are visual only. He could have planted audio mics, but if he did they’re on a separate frequency. And I don’t think there are any, we should have seen the outgoing signals.” 

That’s a relief, at least they can talk openly. “Could you loop security cams and try to evacuate the hotel?”

“I thought of that. But without knowing where he is, we don’t know if he has physical visual of it as well. If he sees that, he could decide to end the game then and there.”

Mac nods. She looks as stressed as he feels.  _ Even her skills can’t solve the problem this time. _ Neither of them are used to being backed against a wall. Generally, if one of them can’t do something, the other one can. They’re a matched pair…just like the twin elevators on this building.  _ That’s it. _

Mac looks up. “They’ve given us an unsolvable problem. So we solve a problem we  _ can _ .” He glances around the room, trying to collect the thoughts that feel like they’re whizzing past his head at an alarming rate, like a swarm of bees. 

“It’s called Atwood’s machine problem.” Mac says. “Basically, it’s about falling bodies. Like…in physics terms, not people,” he adds when Jack looks worried. “Basically, I’m going to let Charlie’s elevator fall enough to defuse the bomb, but then use the other elevator to act as a braking system for this one.” He glances around, patting his pockets. “Anyone got a dry-erase marker?” There’s a glass partition he can write on, but he can’t find anything to write  _ with. _

Normally he’d be able to do the math in his head, but he’s stressed and panicky and he can feel the beginnings of a headache coming on. This isn’t happening quite as often anymore, but unfortunately he also knows it’s never going to completely be a thing of the past. The combination of the untreated severe concussion and Murdoc’s mystery drug did permanent brain damage.

He pushes away that frustrating and stressful little thought to deal with another time. Right now he has bigger problems. 

A sharpie is held out in front of him, and Will smiles at him. “Always carry one of these in my pocket. If someone gets mad about that glass having permanent ink all over it, they can take it out on me later, okay?” He claps a hand gently on Mac’s shoulder. “I got no idea what you’re gonna do with that, but it looks like you sure do. So go for it.” 

* * *

LESS THAN HALF AN HOUR TO GO

MAC IS BEING NERDY AS USUAL

“Never gets old watching him do that.” Jack smiles. “You got kids, Will?”

“Three. My girl just turned fifteen, keeps saying she wants to save the world just like her dad.” He laughs. “The boys are younger, one’s twelve, one’s four.” He glances at Mac, scribbling on the window with a frown of concentration, tongue poked out slightly between his teeth. “Sometimes I feel like I don’t deserve ‘em.” 

Jack nods. “I know what you mean.” He sighs, watching Mac’s slumped shoulders and slightly shaking hands. The kid’s pushing himself to the breaking point and beyond. “Sometimes I don’t think we ever really do deserve them. They’re a gift, you know?”

“For guys like us, they sure are,” Will says. “You strike me as the overwatch type. Probably his, right?” He nods backward toward Charlie, who’s talking to Desi about…something. Jack isn’t sure what. But they look like they’re both very into it.

“Yeah. Two years.” Jack shakes his head. “I got all my bomb nerds home alive. Which was sometimes no easy feat.”

“We did tend to be a difficult bunch.” Will chuckles. “My first overwatch called me ‘tortoise’.” 

“Yeah, it was the slowest job in the army,” Jack says. “But I learned pretty quick the slower the guy the better the job.” He grins. “Must have been some adjustment coming back and working maintenance where everyone wants things done yesterday, huh?”

“Sure was. But a sink faucet’s a whole lot less likely to blow up in my face, too. Not that they haven’t,” Will says. “Still, they’re not nearly as big an explosion.”

“Unless Mac gets his hands on them,” Jack says, glancing back at the kid. “He can make a bomb out of everything  _ and _ the kitchen sink.” He’s particularly fond of being able to make that joke after Mac turned a garbage disposal into a…well, he knew what it was…in Liberia. 

Will laughs. “I mean, watching him make a brake out of an elevator is gonna be pretty impressive, but…I’d pay money to see that sink bomb.”

“You need any help?” Jack asks. 

Mac turns around a little, one hand still on the glass. “A hot knife. And…Will, would you know how to use that on the cable on the other elevator? We need this length.” He taps the glass above part of his calculations. 

“Sure thing.” Will says. “How are we gonna get our hands on a hot knife, though?”

“I got that,” Jack says. “Same as you made in Uganda, right Mac?”

Mac nods. “That’s it.” 

Jack turns to Will with a grin. “Some kids teach their parents how to use smartphones. Mine keeps teaching me how to make weird stuff out of weirder stuff.” 

* * *

Bozer’s watching Mac writing and trying to recall everything he forgot from high school physics. He doesn’t remember exactly how the equation Mac’s describing works, but the little diagram looks really familiar. He hopes things work the same way in the real world as they do on paper. 

He turns around with a frown when he hears a soft thump from the hall behind him. It’s Riley, sagging against the wall, setting down her phone next to her rig. Her eyes are suspiciously shiny.

“Riley?” Bozer asks, walking over to her. “What was that?”

“The black site personnel got back in touch with Matty. As far as they can tell, Pena doesn’t remember having any partners. He says he always worked alone, except for people who did some heavy lifting sometimes.” She sighs. “It looks like he can’t even begin to guess who we’re up against.” 

“You know who else this has written all over it?” Bozer asks. “Murdoc.”

-

_ Bozer walks up to the door. He doesn’t know who’d be coming over at this hour. Jack and Riley and Samantha haven’t been around much since Mac got back from prison. They’re all acting odd, for some reason. Like somehow what happened, the sick prank gone wrong or whatever it was, was their fault. Bozer doesn’t know how they think that, it happened at Mac’s think-tank job, his lawyers don’t work there.  _

_ Still, it might be Jack. He’s kind of trying to helicopter parent, even if Mac doesn’t want to see anyone right now, and he has a tendency to show up at odd times.  _

_ It’s not Jack at the door. The man is Jack’s height, maybe even a little taller, but his face is thin and pale and clean-shaven, and his black hair is slicked back, not cropped up into that faux-hawk that Bozer has no idea how Jack gets away with in court. _

_ “Excuse me, is Angus MacGyver home?” _

_ Something in the purr in the man’s voice when he says Mac’s name makes Bozer feel uneasy.  _ You’re jumping at shadows. Thinking of what happened in prison.  _ So he’s seeing sick lust in any stranger’s eyes. That’s all.  _

_ “Um, it’s not really a good time. He’s been...sick. I’ll go see if he wants to talk to you, Mr…” _

_ The same slick purr hovers in the man’s voice. “Oh, you can just call me Kurt, all my friends do. And any friend of Angus’s is a friend of mine.” _

_ Bozer frowns, and then his phone chimes with a text. He pulls it out, dimly noticing it’s from Mac,  _ that’s weird, _ and then freezes.  _

** _Not my friend. NOT SAFE. GET OUT NOW._ **

_ Bozer looks up just in time to see his own George Washington mask and a gun just below it, leveled at his head. _

-

“Yeah, but he’s definitely still in a black site. Matty checked as soon as we got the news Charlie was kidnapped.” Riley sighs, sliding down the wall. “It does have a lot of his earmarks, though. Using friends against us, a sadistically complicated plan…but there’s something missing. Every other time he’s come after us, he’s wanted Mac for himself. This…this doesn’t fit.” 

Bozer nods slowly.  _ Charlie is primarily Jack’s friend. Murdoc has nothing to gain from mentally torturing Jack with someone who isn’t Mac. He’d rather have taken Mac than Charlie, or this would all have been a ploy to get Mac to walk into his parlor. _ And it isn’t.

“His girlfriend?” Bozer asks suddenly. “Didn’t Mac say Cassian’s mother was still alive? Maybe she’s out to get us.”

“From what I understand, if Murdoc didn’t kill her in Columbia, she hates him enough to be glad we caught him.” Riley leans her head back. “The only thing I can imagine she would want from us is Cassian back, but there’s no ransom in play here. There’s no demands. Just some twisted game.” 

“It’s the kind of test James would have put him through,” Bozer says suddenly. “It’s a challenge. A solve-the-problem-or-pay-the-price situation that I know he loved concocting. Mac has all kinds of stories about the insane stuff that man did when he was a kid. He’d hide things Mac wanted or even needed and force him to track them down from a series of clues.”

“But he’s in a holding cell,” Riley argues. 

“Yeah, and still somehow managed to orchestrate a break in at the seed vault a couple months ago.” Bozer walked out of that interrogation feeling like he’d been played.  _ I got something from him, but I got the sense it was something he wanted to give. _ Bozer’s felt wrong about that ever since. 

“You really think he’d set this whole thing up? And why take Charlie? This feels like it’s aimed at Jack, not Mac.”

“The Charlie part, maybe. But this elaborate game…anyone who knows Jack would know that’s not his thing. They wouldn’t go to so much trouble.” Bozer rubs a hand over his face. “It’s just so frustrating.” He slams a hand into the wall, then sighs. “Sorry. I just…it’s got to be a hundred times worse for Mac.” 

Riley’s phone rings. She glances at it, and when the name “Oversight” pops up on screen, she answers quickly. “What is it?” She switches onto speaker a second later. 

“We have a backup plan.” Patty’s voice is tense. “You said the chemicals in those barrels under the hotel tested as sulfuric acid, correct?” 

“Yes.” Bozer wonders what that has to do with anything. 

“We’re going to try to get a tanker of sodium hydroxide onsite. That way we can instantly neutralize the acid even if the bomb goes off.” She sighs. “We’ll tell you when the tanker arrives, and then Mac can disable the cable cutter. We may not be able to completely stop the damage, but we can at least maintain the structural integrity of the building long enough for an evacuation.”

“Sounds good. I’ll pass that on.” Riley says. “How far out are they?”

“Ten minutes,” Patty says. “We were lucky to find one in the radius.”

Riley nods soundlessly, then hangs up. She sets her phone down and walks up to Mac, speaking quietly. His shoulders relax, just a little, at the news.  _ Guess that means it’s a good plan. _ At least he didn’t veto it the second he heard it.

Riley’s phone begins ringing again, and Bozer grabs it when he sees Oversight again. “This is Bozer, what happened?” 

“The tanker was forced off the road,” Patty says. “The driver’s alright and hazmat is on its way to handle what minor leakage there was from the tanker, but we’re not going to be able to get another one onsite in time.” She sighs. “Somehow whoever set this up must have known what we were doing. Whether they have an inside man or just planned ahead and were watching the roads for a tanker of that chemical, I don’t know. And at this point it barely matters. It’s up to Mac now. But…don’t tell him like that.” 

Bozer nods even though he knows Patty can’t see him.  _ Mac doesn’t need more pressure. But he needs to know the truth. _

* * *

Jack’s spliced rope for years, home on the ranch, repairing broken lariats, making rope bridles, and extending the haylift ropes when sections rotted out. So driving a chisel through the thick cable to fasten a hook to the end of it is just second nature. He’s following Mac’s directions to the letter, and it looks like they’re actually going to be done with time to spare. Mac’s finished with the math part of his work, and now he’s getting ready to hook the cable onto the elevator. 

Jack grimaces when his phone rings again.  _ I’m gonna have to change Charlie’s contact info in my phone after this. _

“You better be on your way out of the country, because after this I’m gonna hunt you down, asshole,” Jack snaps when he answers.

“You could try. Just like you can try to solve this problem with tenth grade math.”  _ I thought Riley said he didn’t have ears on us. How did he know? _ “You were all so focused on the bomb on  _ this _ elevator, you missed this.”

There’s a low explosion that rocks the building. Riley cries out, and Bozer looks stricken. Will and Desi both clench their hands in tight fists. Mac goes white. All of them turn instinctively to where Charlie is, thankfully, still standing in the opening. 

“Wasn’t me,” he says, somewhat shakily. “But…” He’s looking across to the other elevator. Jack rushes to a window, and the others follow. The elevator is nothing more than a smoking wreck. And all their plans just went up in smoke with it. 

* * *

THE ELLISON BUILDING

THEY JUST RAN OUT OF IDEAS AND TIME

Mac kicks the cable on the floor in helpless frustration. Jack shares his sentiments, but wants to avoid a broken toe if he can help it.  _ All that work, and it’s useless now.  _ Whoever this is is basically torturing his poor kid, and he can’t wait to get his hands on them and make them pay. 

“What can I do?” Will asks. He’s pacing, has been ever since the elevator blew up. 

“There’s nothing left you  _ can _ do,” Mac says. “You should get out of here. Go home to your family tonight.”

“So should you,” Will says.

“My family’s right here.” Mac glances around at the assembled group, and Jack realizes the kid’s right.  _ Aside from Diane, who I am very glad is not here potentially about to die with the rest of us, we’re all the family he has. _ Bozer, the closest thing Mac’s ever had to a brother. Riley, his sister in all but blood. Jack, who’s tried his hardest to be the father Mac needs and deserves. And Desi, however she fits in. “I’m staying with them. But you should go home. Those kids don’t need to lose a father tonight.” 

Finally Will nods, and starts walking toward the stairs. When the door finally closes behind him, Mac turns around and walks back to the elevator. “We’re going to try Riley’s plan to block the rails. I’m going to go up on top and try to pull the detonator out before the bomb goes off.” 

“You don’t have enough time left for that plan and you know it. I have to break the glass,” Charlie says. “It’s the only way.” 

Mac’s eyes widen, and Jack is afraid the kid’s about to cry, until he realizes that’s Mac’s ‘you-just-said-something-genius-without-realizing-it’ look.  _ Usually I’m the one it’s directed at.  _ “That’s exactly what we’re gonna do.” He looks at Charlie. “Don’t touch anything until I get back.” 

“Don’t look at me,” Jack says. “But believe it or not, that’s a good thing. When he doesn’t tell me what he’s doing, it means he’s sure it’s gonna work.” Jack has learned that Mac talks himself through builds he’s not certain of. It’s when he dashes off with no explanation and that  _ Mac _ look in his eyes that he’s absolutely sure he’s got the problem solved. 

Still, when Mac comes back with a pail and some cleaning supplies, Jack would really like to know what this plan is. Desi beats him to the question. 

“What is that?”

“We can’t shatter the glass, but we can pour something on it.” Mac is busily mixing together cleaning supplies. “This chemical mixture is going to react with the glass and make it weaker. Glass is resistant to most chemicals, which is why it’s a common material to use as a storage container, but it will dissolve under contact with sodium hydroxide, just like what that tanker was going to use at the hotel. But it’s also a common ingredient in industrial drain cleaners.” He holds up the two bottles he’s dumped into a pail. “This steel bucket won’t react with the sodium hydroxide, so now all we have to do is heat it, splash it on the glass, and it should make it weak enough that Charlie can smash his way through before the elevator falls.” 

He sets down a hot plate that he must have found in a break room. “I’m going to heat it as much as I can before we run out of time, and hope it’s enough.” He’s pacing, fidgeting, practically vibrating. 

“Three minutes left,” Riley finally says. Mac glances at the pail, which is just starting to steam. 

“You guys should stay back. I don’t want any of this stuff getting on your skin. It’s incredibly corrosive,” Mac says. He’s taken the precaution of wearing gloves, goggles, and some chunks of plastic bag wrapped over his face, but Jack is still worried it won’t be enough. 

Mac picks up the pail and splashes the contents over the glass in a roughly human-shaped outline. Jack watches as a hissing steam rises, he can’t tell whether it’s the glass dissolving or just the hot drain cleaner evaporating.  _ This has to work. _ Because if it doesn’t, Mac is going to live with thinking Charlie’s death is his fault for the rest of his life. 

“Is it working?” Riley asks. 

“Only one way to find out.” There’s thirty seconds left on the clock. “Charlie, you ready?”

The man nods, and Jack watches him back up across the elevator. Mac’s fists are clenched tightly at his sides, his whole body vibrating with tension. 

Charlie pushes off, throws himself at the glass…and the weakened patch breaks free with a creaking smash. Charlie tumbles into the hallway, his momentum catching Mac’s shoulder and taking the kid to the ground too. A second later, there’s a whirr and a snap, and Jack watches the smashed elevator vanish before their eyes. 

Charlie rolls over, panting. “Damn.” He looks at Mac. “I thought for sure I was a goner this time.”

Mac doesn’t say anything, just leans his head back against the floor with a sigh of relief and exhaustion. He begins laughing, almost hysterically. A second later, Charlie joins in. Jack sees Riley and Bozer hugging out of the corner of his eye, and Desi is leaning against a wall with her eyes closed, her chest heaving, probably breathing for the first time since Mac picked up that pail.  _ We did it.  _

“Talk to me, someone.” It’s Matty, over comms. “Tac team just confirmed the acid bomb deactivated itself.”

_ And they know that means the elevator snapped. _ “Charlie’s alright. Mac got him out. He did it.” Jack feels like laughing or sobbing or maybe both. He starts walking up to the two men collapsed on the floor. “He figured it out.” 

Mac’s shirt is covered in spatters of the chemical, and Jack can see red, irritated burns through some of the holes. “Come on, kiddo, you need to get that washed off.” Mac nods, standing up slowly.

“You did it, kiddo. Charlie’s okay.” 

Mac just stares out the empty elevator door, fists still clenched tightly. Then he turns his head into Jack’s shoulder and starts to shake. Jack feels tears soaking through his shirt.  _ Awww kiddo. _

Desi’s helping Charlie to his feet. “We’ve got an ambulance on the way, now that there’s no more threat of a bomb. Let’s get you down there.”

“I’m fine. Let’s go catch the son of a bitch that set this up.” Charlie’s voice is determined, but he’s swaying slightly in Desi’s hold. 

“Charlie, don’t argue. You may have a thick skull, but you took one hell of a crack on it.” Jack shakes his head. “Come on. Mac, tell me how to get this stuff off your skin in the bathroom, okay? We’ll see you guys downstairs.”

He helps Mac into the nearest bathroom, then hoists the kid up on the counter like he’s a ten year old with a skinned knee. He pulls his own shirt off, soaks it under running water, then helps Mac unbutton his ruined one and pats gently at the chemical burns. Mac helps, leaning over the sink to splash water on with his hands to rinse as much of the cleaner off as possible. 

Once they’re satisfied there won’t be any more immediate damage done, Jack helps Mac down, rinses and wrings out his shirt, and hands it to Mac. “Sorry, but it’s better than the contaminated one.” Mac nods and tugs it on. 

They make their way downstairs to the ambulance. Charlie’s got a white bandage wrapped around his head, and with the blood cleaned off his face, he looks a lot better. His arms have some bandages on them as well, Jack guesses he landed pretty heavy on some of the glass he broke. One of the EMTs is shining a light into his eyes and making notes on a piece of paper. Desi and Bozer are talking to the police on scene, and Riley’s with a Phoenix forensics tech, leaning on the back of their SUV. Jack takes Mac to the second ambulance and explains the issue with the drain cleaner burns. The EMT checks the ones on Mac’s arms, then asks him to remove his shirt. Mac does, shuddering slightly. Jack steps in a little closer and waits the entire time the medical team cleans and inspects the burns. 

“What were you doing that splashed  _ hot _ drain cleaner all over you?” one of the EMTs asks.

“Getting him out of a booby-trapped elevator,” Mac replies, nodding over at Charlie. Jack sees the two medics exchange confused glances. 

Riley walks up as soon as Mac’s been allowed to put his shirt back on. Jack had seen her pacing slightly in the background, but he could tell she wanted to give Mac some privacy.  _ What happened in Brazil shook her too.  _ Jack knows she feels guilty it wasn’t her who was taken.  _ If it had been, Mac would have felt guilty about  _ that. There’s no winning with his kids.

“What’s goin’ on, Riles?” Jack asks. 

“We lifted a print off an inner part of the cable cutter. I’m running it now,” Riley says. “Let’s see if we can figure out who this guy is and why he’s so invested in this game.” 

“Nice work.” Jack avoids looking at the bottom of the building, where the elevator car is totally destroyed. 

Mac wanders over to Charlie. “How’s the head?”

“Thanks to you, still attached to the rest of me.” Charlie frowns when he sees Mac’s face crumple. “Hey, sorry. Too soon.”  _ He and I have always been like that. Laughing in the face of danger. Making jokes so we don’t have to deal with how close we were to death.  _

Mac scuffs a shoe over the ground. “I almost couldn’t do it. If you hadn’t said you were going to break the glass…”

“Yeah, well, you figured it out. And I’m still here. That’s what matters.” Charlie reaches out to pull Mac into a hug, then frowns. “What happened to your…that’s Jack’s shirt. Jack?” Jack shrugs, glancing at his own bare chest. 

“The little drain cleaner trick had some unexpected side effects,” Jack says. He accepts the scrub shirt the EMT hands him, with a grin. “There, you won’t have to be jealous of my incredibly attractive dad body anymore.” 

Riley groans, then looks down at her computer, and Jack watches all the amusement drain out of her face, to be replaced by pure dread. 

“We’ve got a match on those fingerprints…” She trails off, setting her rig down hard on the back of the ambulance. 

Charlie glances past her to look at the screen. “Okay, I got no idea who that guy is. Or why he’d have wanted me dead.” 

“ _ That _ is Tiberius Kovacs.” Jack says, feeling like his blood’s frozen. “Man’s gotten a lot smarter since being dead, I guess.” He and Kovac had few things in common, but they did prefer solving problems with bullets and fists instead of science. He wonders when that changed. 

Something about this whole situation is giving Jack a bad feeling in the pit of his stomach.  _ Sure, Kovacs likes to attach the people we care about, it makes sense that he’d start with Charlie and plan to work his way up the line. But… _ The Kovacs Jack remembers preferred to leave nothing to chance. A clean headshot is more his style. 

_ Maybe he’s not working alone. _ But he’d heard Bozer talking to Riley earlier, and between the two of them they’d eliminated the Ghost, Murdoc, and most likely James _ . We have all our wacko supervillains in custody.  _ Which begs the question, who’s feeding Kovacs a plan like that? 

* * *

Mac doesn’t like the look on Jack’s face when they climb into their SUV.  _ He’s almost as dead set on getting Kovacs as he was on going after Murdoc.  _ He’s sure Jack’s feeling guilty about what happened today.  _ He thought he killed Kovacs years ago. And then refused to join the hunt for him a few months ago, when they found out he was still alive.  _

Mac knows what it’s like to think that if you’d done one thing differently, you might not be where you are now. And he can tell that’s what Jack’s feeling. He’s doubly grateful Charlie isn’t dead.  _ Jack would have been grieving, but more than that, he’d have blamed himself. _ At least this way, they’re going into the situation with Jack having some sense of self-preservation.  _ If Charlie had died, he might have decided any risk necessary to take Kovacs out of the picture was justified. _ Because if the rumors about the man’s tactics are true, Mac, Riley, or Diane could have been next on the hit list. 

Diane is at Phoenix…again. Jack had apologized to her profusely when he called, it’s barely been a month since the Murdoc incident. Diane had simply laughed and said she’d taken a page out of Jack’s book and had a bag packed and ready to be tossed in the car at a moment’s notice. 

_ “I was hoping we’d be using it for a slightly more fun escape from the real world, but duty calls.” _ Mac can’t quite wrap his head around how fast Diane settled into the chaos that’s being part of the life of an international agent.  _ “Next time, see if you can surprise me with a weekend in the mountains instead of a hit man on the prowl.” _

Jack had agreed with an amused chuckle and then told Mac and Riley he wasn’t going to let them out of his sight the rest of the op. 

Kovacs is too good to leave traces of his presence on cameras, but now that they know it’s him, they were able to link up with the active task force. Between their information and Riley’s incomplete signal trace (the video feeds stopped sending as soon as the elevator cable snapped), they’ve got a location. An apartment building only a few blocks away. Jack’s breaking a lot of laws getting them there, and Bozer looks faintly green. 

When they get there, Jack glances from Bozer to the car. “I don’t even know what to tell you, man,” he says. “I’d say stay in the car, but I can’t leave you here alone.” He glances at Desi. “You’re gonna go watch the fire escape, can you take him with you?”

She nods. “Okay.” 

Desi walks around to the back of the building with Bozer, and Jack and Riley head for the stairs. Mac follows them.  _ Jack knew better than to tell me or Riley to stay behind. _ Bozer at least listens some of the time. 

When they get to the apartment door, Riley scans for signals while Mac and Jack check for wires. It’s tedious, but better than being dead. Besides, if Kovacs is still here, which apparently everyone doubts, he’s got to come past them or Desi and Bozer to escape. 

“Door’s clean,” Riley whispers, and Jack kicks it in with a heavy thud. 

All three of them step into the apartment. It’s deceptively nice-looking, a sort of minimalist modern place with lots of white. Mac was expecting…well…sleaze. 

What he wasn’t expecting was the pressure plate in the faux-tile floor. When he hears the click and whirr, he flinches. Jack and Riley both look down at their feet, then at each other. And then the microwave on the kitchen counter pings, a too-loud sound in the silence, and the door swings open to reveal a block of probably the same explosive from the elevator, with a clock ticking down from three minutes. 

“Call our bomb techs,” Jack says. “They’re probably still at the Ellison.” 

Riley pulls out her phone, but Mac sees her look from it to the bomb with a frown.  _ They’ll never get here in time. Jack wouldn’t even be able to get here that fast.  _

“I can disarm it.” Mac carefully walks over to the beeping bomb. “Just…” He has to. They can’t have saved Charlie only for Jack and Riley to die. He pulls out his knife and gets to work. The bomb is a complicated mess, wires connected to random things mixed in with the important pieces. It’s designed to slow him down, to make his job harder. He glances at the clock and wishes he hadn’t, there’s only a minute and ten seconds left. 

He swipes a hand over his face, pushing his sweaty hair out of his eyes, and turns back to the bomb. His fingers trace the wires, his mind supplying what Pena always told him about finding the trigger wires and the dummy ones. 

Finally he rests his scissors over the deceptively nondescript grey wire that coils itself down into the bomb. He has forty-two seconds left to make his decision.  _ Is it the right move or the wrong one?  _ Their last bomb was a trap. Meant to kill whoever tried to disarm it. 

Mac looks from the wire to the clock. He pulls the timer mechanism’s cover off carefully and removes the tiny vial of clear liquid inside. Then he snips the wire, with fourteen seconds left on the still-ticking timer. 

He slumps down with his back to the counter, too tired to even fold up his knife. He can hear the heavy tread of boots on the stairs, and then the bomb team steps in.  _ They must have been following us already, to get here so fast.  _ He’s deeply grateful. 

He hands the bomb off to the technicians, who balance it carefully in their thickly gloved hands as they place it inside a containment unit. They’re going to blow it right out in their van, unwilling to take it back to the lab to be examined. Mac can’t blame them. He remembers the decoy bomb the Ghost used the first time they met, and the one today hidden inside the bomb robot itself. 

His hands feel weird, a little sticky, like there was some sort of filmy residue on the bomb. He can feel it on his face too. He turns on the kitchen faucet and washes his hands and splashes some water on his face, hoping that will also calm the heated flush of adrenaline and stress. He feels too warm, and the room seems confining. 

“Nice job, kiddo.” Jack claps him on the shoulder, and Mac flinches, he’s so tense and keyed up the gentle slap felt like a punch. 

“I’ve got something,” Riley says, from where she’s kneeling, digging through a trash can. There’s a wadded-up piece of paper in her hand. 

“What’s that, Riles?” Jack asks.

“It’s printoff of a flight plan.” Riley holds up the paper. “This was filed for a private two-engine plane taking off from a small runway outside the city.” She pulls up a map on her computer. “This is it.”

“Okay, let’s get over there.”

“Matty’s got a raid team inbound, they’re closer than we are,” Riley says. “We’ll go back them up. Hopefully, they get there before he takes off.” 

The ride to the airport is the definition of insane. Jack guns the car through three lights on the brink of red, earning them a lot of angry honking, picks up a police tail that they lose after just one block, and even jumps one of the SUV’s tires up on a curb. 

They reach the airstrip just as the raid team’s van does, and Jack’s right behind it when they crash through the fence gates and park in front of the small twin-engine just getting ready to taxi down the runway. Mac watches Desi sprint out before the car even parks, her rifle slung across her shoulder. 

“Tiberius Kovacs, you’re surrounded. Turn off the engine and come out with your hands up.” Mac flinches at how loud the raid team’s announcement is. His head aches and this is making it worse. He licks his lips, his mouth feels dry. Probably somewhat due to stress, but he also can’t remember the last time he actually took a drink of water since they got the call that Charlie was in trouble. No wonder he has a headache. He hasn’t taken his meds either, now that he thinks about it.  _ Oops. _ His anxiety is through the roof, his heart feels like it’s trying to beat out of his chest, and this whole situation is not helping. Not one bit.

The man who steps out of the plane isn’t Kovacs. It’s a guy with greying hair and shaking raised hands. Shaking most likely because Kovacs is in fact right behind him, a gun pointed at the man’s head.  _ I was afraid, for a second, when I saw the wrong person walk out, that we’d been played. _ Something about this isn’t sitting right for Mac. Not right at all. 

“Don’t even think about it,” Jack says. “Drop that or you’re history.”

“You think that threat scares me?” Kovacs snarls. “You can’t hit the broad side of a barn, Dalton, I’m living proof.”

“You really want to test me?” Jack asks. “Because the only person who ever beat my sniper score is on the roof of that hangar with a rifle right now. And I guarantee you, even if I miss, she won’t.” 

Mac turns to see Desi perched on the edge of the roof, her rifle in front of her, trained on Kovacs. 

The man looks from Jack to her, then pulls his gun back, raising his hands and letting the weapon dangle from one finger. Jack rushes forward to pull it away, yanking the man’s hands behind his back and cuffing him. 

Mac leans back against the SUV, feeling suddenly exhausted. It’s over, he should feel good. They caught Kovacs, he’s going away for good this time, and they’ll be sure. But all he feels is overwhelming tiredness. He wants to go home and sleep for a week. 

Desi rejoins them, chuckling. “I can’t believe you admitted I’m a better shot than you,” she gloats, tossing her rifle into the car. 

“Hey, I had to tell him something. Besides, to him, that probably means you shoot like the average deer hunter. Clearly he thinks I’m incompetent.”

“Well, you were supposed to kill him and failed.” 

Jack glowers.

Everyone piles in and Jack pulls out. Mac leans his head on the window, it feels cool and comfortable. He’s too hot and he’s tired. Maybe he’s coming down with something. Or maybe he’s just exhausted and dehydrated.

He closes his eyes, letting the motion of the car lull him into a vague sort of sleep.

He jolts upright when a horn blares and Jack curses. “Watch where you’re going, you moron! Are you blind?” Jack shouts. Mac figures someone cut him off, not a rare occurrence on the LA streets. He sits up to look for the car…and then realizes even though his eyes are open, everything is just various shades of dark and blurry. 

“Mac?” Jack asks. 

“J-jack?” Mac whispers. “Jack, I...something’s wrong.” 

“Wrong?” Jack asks.

“I can’t…” Mac swallows hard. “Jack, I can’t see.” 

Jack whips the car sideways, earning  _ them _ several angry blares on a horn, and pulls into what Mac assumes is the parking lot. The car stops and Jack’s door opens. So does one in the back. 

“Riley, get us to Phoenix. Right now.” Jack’s voice is cold and hard. Mac hears the jingle of keys being handed over. He’s surprised Desi doesn’t protest, but he knows why Jack chose Riley. She’s lived in LA longer, she knows all the shortcuts, all the tricks. 

Jack comes around to the door where Mac’s sitting. “Hey, can I move you to the back so I can sit with you?” 

Mac hears some scuffling as the impromptu Chinese Fire Drill occurs, and what seems like a moment later, he’s in the back between Jack and Bozer, and Riley is peeling out of the lot while Desi’s on the phone with Matty, asking them to have a medical team standing by as soon as they get to Phoenix. 

“Mac, breathe, it’s okay. You’re going to be ok.” But he can’t breathe, he can’t think, because  _ he can’t see. _

There are hands on his shoulders, Jack’s voice is a reassuring persistent rumble in his ears, but he’s so scared and so hot and tired and thirsty and he just can’t help it, he wants to scream or sob or anything, but he’s too scared even for that.  _ What happened to me? _

He was so careful. The drain cleaner burned his chest and arms a little, but it’s not the sort of thing that affects something as distant from that as his eyes. He didn’t let the fumes get in them, and he wore goggles to keep them from getting splashback. He was so careful. Because this is exactly what he  _ didn’t _ want to happen. 

He’s always thought he’d rather go deaf than blind. Losing his hearing would suck, but it would be manageable. He’d learn to live around not being aware of everything, especially with his team backing him up. He’d still be able to do normal things, for the most part. He’d miss Jack’s bad karaoke and Bozer’s accent impressions, but…he’d survive it. 

If he’s blind, he’s helpless. Depending on someone else to make sure his surroundings are safe, that nothing has changed or moved. Never sure where he is, whether he’s going to touch a safe thing or a dangerous thing.  _ I won’t just be finished at Phoenix. It’ll take years to relearn my whole life.  _ It’s a daunting prospect.  _ Just when I was getting used to the idea that I’m going to be living with probably worsening brain damage forever. _

Momentarily, the awful thought that maybe that’s worsening and causing this floats into his mind.  _ Dr. Grey said it mostly affected the parts of my brain responsible for emotions and fine motor skills. But what if it affected my sight too, and we just didn’t know until now? _ It came on so suddenly…but he did hit the floor hard when he fell back with Charlie…

Desi’s singing again, the soft Vietnamese filling the vehicle. Mac’s not sure if it’s the same lullaby as last time, or something else. But the unfamiliar words grab some of the floating fragments of his attention and give them something to latch onto. He wonders if he’d remember enough of the other lullaby to know if this was it. He wasn’t exactly in the ideal situation…

He  _ was _ in the back of a vehicle, in the dark. He’d squeezed his eyes closed because he was scared and he didn’t want to see what was coming. Like that was going to make it any less real.

He doesn’t recognize the words themselves, his attempts at actually learning Vietnamese have been spotty at best. Despite the fact that he can soak up science and physics like a sponge, languages aren’t really his thing. But he does recognize the tune. It is the same lullaby. 

Jack’s fingers squeeze his, he knows those callouses.  _ It’s going to be okay. As long as Jack’s here, I’ll be okay. _

* * *

Desi isn’t sure how it all went so wrong so fast. One moment, they were putting Kovacs in the back of a secure transport, and she was rubbing it in that Jack admitted she’s a better shot. And the next, Mac was panicking, telling Jack he couldn’t see. 

It doesn’t make sense. Mac was never out of their sight except when he was getting the drain cleaner, and he’s adamant he didn’t get any of that in his eyes at all. Besides, she remembers him wearing a pair of goggles.  _ How he found them I have no idea. They might have even been in his bag. _

It’s not like the mission before this had any strange toxins either. It was an in and out information retrieval, that had probably needed only half of them in actual practice. Mac never even had to go inside the building, he’d been making them a diversion for getting out. But she’s seen him make miniature bombs the same way at least four times. That’s never had any side effects before. 

He’s had the same things to eat and drink as all of them. She can’t imagine how he could have been poisoned. She tries not to think about the agent she was undercover with in Zimbabwe, the one whose vision suddenly got much worse, and went to the hospital only to find out he had a massive tumor on his brain. He’d died five months later. 

_ That’s not going to be Mac. Don’t think like that.  _

She’s singing as much to calm herself as to calm Mac. She has to keep it together, for his sake.  _ You’re not even the one who went blind. _ She’s surprised Riley’s holding it together as well as she is. Probably concentrating on driving like a bat out of hell is helping. She can’t afford to lose it right now. A glance in the rearview mirror has told her Bozer is crying. 

Desi’s spent years training herself not to get emotional about co-workers. Part of it is a self-protection mechanism, keeping herself from being hurt by someone’s death. Part of it was sheer necessity. If a fellow UC got outed and killed, she couldn’t show an iota of sympathy, or she would be next. It was imperative that she not let on her attachment to anyone, at any time. 

But what took her a decade to build vanished in months, with Jack’s team. She is attached. Deeply, and irrevocably. And if anything happens to Mac, she’s not sure how she’ll be able to live with that. 

* * *

PHOENIX MEDICAL

FOR ONCE, MAC IS GLAD HE’S IN HERE

Mac can’t see his team hovering, but he can  _ sense  _ them there. He can hear Jack pacing, and Riley chewing a stick of gum like it personally offended her, and Bozer trying to take ‘calm breaths’ the way he always does before he starts filming, and he thinks it’s Desi tapping her nails on a bed rail. 

Trying to locate them is making it a little hard to focus on what the doctor’s saying, and he knows he needs to.  _ They’re right there, it’s okay. Now listen. _ He forces his brain to accept that he’s not alone in here, and pushes it back to the conversation at hand. 

“Until we know what it is that blinded you, we’re going to have trouble treating you.” Dr. Grey says gently. “Do you remember coming into contact with any substances that could cause this?”

“Well, I sprayed heated drain cleaner at a glass elevator door a couple hours ago. But I was wearing goggles,” Mac adds quickly.  _ I was trying to be careful, so this didn’t happen. _ But he doesn’t remember dealing with anything else corrosive today. Except…

“Wait. There was a bomb. In Kovacs’s office.” Mac remembers the sticky feeling on his hands.  _ There was some sort of residue on it. I assumed from the explosive compound. But… _ “It felt like it had been coated in something. And I touched my face while I was working on it, wiping off sweat.” 

“Okay, that’s most likely what caused this. Where is the bomb now?” Dr. Grey asks. “We could have someone swab it and do an analysis.”

“They already blew it up. To avoid risking a dummy bomb inside.” Mac sighs. “And I washed my hands and face while I was there, because I wanted to get the feeling off them.” 

“Ok. That’s a start. We’ll run some tests, see if there’s any residue left on your eyes. Just hold still.”

He hears her turn around when she’s done. “It appears to be a contact-based toxin. I’m assuming all of you touched him.” 

“Yeah,” Jack says, his voice rough.

“Then you four need to go shower now.” Dr. Grey’s voice invites no argument, and Mac hears the footsteps receding. 

“Okay, let’s start making you comfortable and doing what we can while we wait for the tests,” Dr. Grey says. She’s brisk and efficient, helping Mac out of his clothes and into a hospital gown.

“Please don’t throw out the shirt, it’s Jack’s,” Mac pleads when he hears the sound of cloth being wadded up and shoved in a plastic bag. 

“If he puts up a fuss, tell him to come argue with me.” She walks away. “I’m going to get some neutral solution eyedrops. There’s a lot of irritation and dryness, and that might also help to flush out any remaining contamination.” She returns and tilts his head sideways, washing each eye out with a solution that burns and makes Mac’s nose run. He blinks involuntarily. 

He can feel something cool pressing against the edge of his temple, he guesses there’s a basin under his eye collecting the liquid that runs off. Probably how they’re going to test for what caused this. 

Dr. Grey walks away again, and Mac leans back on the pillow, blinking and trying not to cry. He starts to sit up when he hears another set of footsteps coming. He can already tell it’s not Dr. Grey, these sound like some kind of dress shoes. Dr. Grey always wears tennis shoes that squeak a little on the tile. He’s kind of surprised how many non-visual things there are that identify a person. 

“Oh Mac.” Diane’s voice is soft, gentle. Mac’s heart skips a beat at the thought that the first thing that popped into his mind when he heard it was  _ mom. _ He can feel the gentle hover of her hands over his face, the warmth. “They said I can’t touch you right now, I’m so sorry.”

“That’s how this happened, I guess,” Mac whispers. “Whatever got in my eyes was on something I touched. They sent Jack and Riley and Bozer and Desi to wash down.” All of them had been touching him at some point after he was in contact with the bomb. He hopes they got it off their skin in time. Or at least didn’t touch their faces.  _ I think I probably got most of it off me when I washed my hands and face at that warehouse. _ He’s going to take a shower as soon as Jack gets back. Being unable to see is making him panicky and Dr. Grey agreed that since he’d already washed once, he could be allowed to wait for someone he trusts. She’s already flushed his eyes out, but it hasn’t done any good, and Mac’s  _ scared. _

He wants to lean into Mom’s touch, let her hold and comfort him, but he can’t until he’s clean. But he does think maybe he trusts her enough to let her help. “I have to take a shower,” he manages to choke out. “Could you…could you help me?”

“Of course. If you want me to. You’re sure it’s okay?”

“I’ll tell you if it’s not.” He’s getting better about that. “But I just…I don’t want to sit here with everyone holding me at arms length anymore.” 

“Okay. Let me go get the doctor and ask her what I have to do.” Her shoes click away, but when she comes back, there’s the soft flap-pat of rubbery flip-flops. 

“Dr. Grey gave me some soap and a cloth, and told me how to work the shower. She said if Jack comes back, she’ll tell him where we are.” Mom helps him stand up and swing his legs over the side of the bed. He can feel a glove on her hand as her thumb brushes his neck. 

“Here, there’s a bed sticking out a little, just watch your step.” She’s guiding him gently, matching her pace to his slow, shuffling steps. Mac’s thankful there’s a full decontamination suite in Phoenix Medical itself. He isn’t sure he could make it all the way to the general locker room in this condition.

“Okay, there’s a little lip on the edge of the shower, and a step up. Here we go.” Diane says, and then Mac can reach out his hand and feel cool fiberglass. 

“I’m going to have to take off your gown now, Dr. Grey said we have to wash down your whole body. Are you okay?” He nods, and then a moment later he feels her fingers undoing the tie behind his neck. As soon as she slips the cloth off him, he shivers, wrapping his arms around himself. The slightly damp floor under his feet and the awareness that he’s naked are pushing his feverish thoughts back toward the past.  _ Don’t go there, stay here. _

Mom’s voice is grounding, no one in prison ever sounded like that. “Mac, are you alright? Do you still want to do this?”

“Yeah.” 

“Okay, step back a little, I’m going to turn the water on and I don’t want it to shock you, alright?” Her hands are on his shoulders, guiding him back just a single step, and then he hears the click of the knob, and the swish of water coming out. Splatter from the floor splashes his feet and legs, and the room fills with a thick steam almost immediately. Diane leads him gently into the spray.

“It’s too hot, can you make it colder?” Mac asks. He’s already so feverish. The cooler water that starts flowing out almost immediately is such a relief. He wants to stand in it forever, because he feels so hot and so absolutely parched. 

“Okay, Mac, I’m going to start using the neutralizing soap the doctor gave me. I’m going to have to touch you with a washcloth, is that okay?” 

He nods, then realizes he should probably verbalize that. “Yes.” 

She’s gentle, tilting his head with small movements to wash his face, rubbing the cloth over his shoulders and arms. “I’m sorry, it kind of smells funny,” she says when she’s working on his face, and Mac forces himself not to laugh and get it in his mouth, because she’s right, and he’s sure it tastes worse than it smells. 

He hears her breath catch when she sees the scar on his chest, and feels her fingers ghost over it before she returns to washing him. He hears a hitched breath over the sound of the running water, and he wonders if she’s crying. 

She lets him take care of washing himself below his waist, but she insists on helping him sit down on the little ledge running around the interior of the shower so she can wash his legs and feet and he doesn’t have to try to bend over. He appreciates that, he thinks if he tried to lean down he might  _ fall _ down. 

Once they’re done scrubbing his skin, she turns her attention to his hair. He hears the snap of the soap bottle being opened again, and then a sound like maybe she’s rubbing her hands together. 

“I’m going to have to touch your hair now. Still okay?” 

“Still okay.” 

She must have changed into scrubs, he can feel the edges of the too-large sleeves brushing against his hyper-sensitive skin. But her hands, even through the gloves, are gentle, carding through his hair and lathering in soap. She brushes it out of his face. “Here, lean back, so the…” her voice sticks and breaks. “So the soap doesn’t get in your eyes,” she finally finishes. 

Mac smiles. 

She’s not Jack, but she doesn’t need to be, because it’s still okay. He still trusts her. 

* * *

PHOENIX HOLDING

JACK’S ABOUT TO START BREAKING BONES

If it wasn’t for the fact that the most likely reason Mac is blind is whatever was on that microwave bomb, Jack would be in medical with him. But since the man responsible for doing that is sitting in one of their holding cells, Jack decides the most useful thing he can do is go down there and have a chat with him, and maybe,  _ hopefully, _ find out there’s a way to fix this.  _ Mac needs his family right now, but he also needs a chance at maybe getting his sight back. If it’s not too late. _

Kovacs isn’t cracking, not even for Matty. He’s surprised she approves his request to personally interrogate Kovacs, but he thinks she needs a break before  _ she _ breaks the man’s stubborn face. And he knows she wants to see Mac too.  _ She’s been stuck in here with Kovacs since we got him. She’s got to be aching to see how Mac is, for herself.  _

So now it’s Jack, sitting in the chair across from the man in handcuffs. 

“I’m surprised you haven’t put a bullet in my head by now, Dalton,” Kovacs says. “Oh wait, you can’t. You’ve already tried.”

_ He thinks goading me about my failure hurts me? _ Maybe once it would have. But now, what hurts far, far more is the thought that this man is responsible for potentially blinding Mac for the rest of his life. 

“Yeah, well, you’re not going to get a quick death. You lost your chance at that when you weaseled your way outta dying the first time. This time, you are gonna spend the rest of your life rotting in the blackest hole my bosses can find, never to see the light of day again.”

“Oh, like your teammate. Or is he your son?” Kovacs asks. “What is this threat, an eye for an eye, so to speak?”

Jack flinches.  _ Does that mean what he did to Mac is permanent? _

“What did you give him?” Jack snarls. 

“If it’s any consolation, Dalton, this little trick was an insurance policy.” Kovacs sneers. “It was just fate that he could be used as a weapon against you too.”

Jack can’t help but think of how helpless the kid seems now, blinded and frightened. “What have you done? What does that mean?”

Kovac only smiles. “I really thought it might not work, after he solved that little problem I had been guaranteed was a no-win scenario and you had an extra bomb tech on your team.” Something about that sentence sounds wrong, but Jack is to angry and scared to place it now. “I assumed you would make the choice that saved the most people, you always seem to.” He shrugs. “Kill one person to save hundreds, the math is easy, isn’t it?”

“It is when the person at the end of my scope is a raging psychopath.” But the truth is, Jack can’t even exactly say that honestly anymore. He spared Murdoc, because Mac asked him to. But Mac isn’t here now. “But I’m not going to kill you, because I need the name of whatever you used to blind Mac.” 

“And once I give it to you, what then?”

“Then I won’t shoot you, because Mac wouldn’t want me to.” Jack leans over the table. “He’s funny like that, lucky for you.” 

“You idolize that boy, don’t you? Following him around like a loyal guard dog.” Kovacs laughs. “What do you see in him? You know he has as much blood on his hands as any of us.” Jack wants to argue, but he remembers the accidents that claimed the lives of cartel members and some of their own adversaries. Still, Mac isn’t like him. He looks for a way that doesn’t turn the most enemies into a memory. The only deaths he’s responsible for are accidents. “You think he’s innocent, that he can do no wrong.” Kovacs smiles, a cruel empty glee that reminds Jack for a moment of Murdoc. “Making you watch him suffer, watch him bent and broken? This is the best revenge.” He shrugs. “Go tell him what happened to him, who’s responsible for his misery. See if he’s still the same moral compass you imagine him to be. Or if he asks you to make me pay. An eye for an eye, so to speak.”

Jack doesn’t have to, because he _knows._ _Clearly Kovacs doesn’t know everything about Mac. _Because only a few months ago, Jack stood over Murdoc ready to pull the trigger, and stopped only because Mac wanted him to. _He could spare the life of the person who’d been cruelest to him. He wouldn’t ask me to kill Kovacs now._

He’s not sure how Mac ever does it. How he stood in that barn, looked at the monster who made his life hell and asked Jack not to pull the trigger. Jack can’t say he understands the kid at times like that. But he sure as hell respects it.

“Mac is a better man than you or I could ever hope to be.” Jack stands up. If he stays any longer he’s going to beat Kovacs’s face to a pulp, and then he definitely won’t be able to tell them anything. He waits in the hall until Matty comes back. The second she sees him, her shoulders slump.  _ She knows if I left the cell and didn’t run straight to the infirmary, the news isn’t good. _

“He’s just gloating, Matty. He’s not talking, because he wants us to watch Mac suffer.”

“Take him down to the cell block and out of my sight,” Matty snaps. The guards nod, stepping into the room, unfastening Kovacs’s cuffs from the table and leading him to the door. Jack sighs, leaning against the wall, then pushing himself back into motion. Mac needs him right now, and that’s where he needs to be. 

* * *

EIGHT HOURS EARLIER

PHOENIX HOLDING CELLS

“I trust everything is still moving according to plans.”

The voice on the other end of James’s contraband phone sounds exasperated. “It’s been a year. I’m tired of being your mouthpiece.”

“It took time,” James says. “I had to play hard to get, you know that. But with La Ola floundering after I removed Gomez from the board, you were able to snap up their manufacturing facilities at the Island. And now we have Passeur’s drug. It’s all going according to plan.” 

“Your plan.” He frowns at the bitterness. 

“I told you before I went after Angus that if I went dark this was the play. Didn’t I?”

“I don’t like being your contingency plan.” The voice sharpens. “I’ve always been your second choice.”

“Don’t forget, when I found you, you were going nowhere. No future, no chance. I made you.” James snaps. “Everything you are now, you owe me.” 

“And now you’re going to threaten to unmake me? You need me.” James can tell this stalemate is going nowhere, it’s going to have to be solved in person. He sighs.

“You and I can talk about this later. Just have our people standing by.”

“The plan is already in motion.” 

* * *

PHOENIX HOLDING CELLS

EXACTLY EIGHT HOURS AND TWO MINUTES LATER

James looks up when the door to the cell block buzzes open. He can’t really see that far into the hall from the tiny reinforced window in his cell door, but he knows who it will be already. 

He smiles as he hears the grunts of fighting and thudding fists against bodies.  _ That man’s an animal. _ Tiberius Kovacs apparently lost most of his ability to feel physical pain when Dalton’s headshot failed to kill him. He’s like a wild animal that would chew itself out of a trap. Or at least break his thumbs to get out of cuffs and then start throwing punches anyway. 

A few moments later, the familiar face appears at the door of his cell. James holds up the miniature array of bombs and incendiary devices, all the work of stolen moments, made from the supplies his corrupted guard smuggled in to him. 

“Step back, door’ll be open in a minute.” He tucks one of the devices against the lock and then pulls his mattress over his head, ducking down in a corner. The second the explosion goes off, alarms begin wailing. They’re going to have to move fast. 

Now that the prison wing is in lockdown, James is well aware even the guards’ badges can’t be stolen and used to open the secure doors. But he worked on the team designing this location. He knows where the reinforcing for those doors is. A couple well-placed bombs and he and Kovacs are on the move, both of them supplied with the incapacitated guards’ guns. 

“Okay, where is it?” Kovacs asks.

“We need to make one quick stop first.” James consults the floor directory in the stairwell, tapping on the purple writing indicating the server room. “Then you’ll get what you came for.”

Kovacs makes quick work of the guards at the server room doors, and James’s bomb makes quick work of the doors themselves. A mini EMP tossed into the room should do the rest of the job for them. James wishes he had a hacker on hand, what’s on those computers is worth billions. But he doesn’t, so the next best thing is turning them into expensive scrap. 

Then he leads Kovacs in the direction of the labs. 

An incendiary in an air vent starts immediate fire suppression protocol, warning all personnel to get out of the room before the oxygen-depletion system engages. James waits until the flood of R&D employees vacates the space, then calmly strolls through the doors. 

“What about the oxygen?” Kovacs asks.

“Fire suppression controls are on the servers we just killed,” James says. “Told you it was worth making the stop.” He heads straight for a cabinet in the far corner of the room, grabbing a couple paperclips from a desk to pick the lock with. When it swings open, he glances at the chemical formula labels on the various lockboxes, then pulls out the one with the formula for the Converter on its label.

“This is it?” Kovacs asks. 

“Phoenix stores all its high-security research in boxes like this. The drug samples are inside, along with the flashdrives containing all the research data. It’s meant to be a safety measure.”

“I knew it would pay to find a man who knew the Phoenix’s inner workings.”

“I told you I’d find what you wanted.” James says. “And with these samples, and the research the Phoenix Foundation has kindly provided, we can make as much of it as you can sell.”

“Who said the truth isn’t profitable?” Kovacs smirks. “Well, for me at least.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” James snaps. 

“Now that I have the formula, I no longer need  _ you. _ ”

“You do if you want prepped manufacturing facilities capable of starting production on the Converter tomorrow.”  _ Of course he wants to go back on his deal. Which is why I have insurance.  _ James hasn’t stayed alive this long by trusting anyone.  _ You always have an ace up your sleeve, because criminals are never trustworthy. Not even when you’re on the same side.  _

“The Island?” Kovacs asks, and a cold chill creeps down James’s spine. “I’ve already made a deal that put that place in my hands a month ago.” He pulls out his phone. “If you don’t believe me, why don’t you talk to my  _ new _ partner?” 

He dials the same number James did not an hour ago from the burner phone.  _ Damn it. _

As soon as the voice answers, he grabs the phone. “Damn you, what the hell is this? What are you doing making deals behind my back? You wait for my approval before you move on anything, we made that clear.” 

“Don’t you understand yet? You thought I’d be content to let you call the shots and keep on marching to your orders. But I’ve been playing my own game. I’m sorry, but now you’re in my way.” 

James barely has time to realize that the one person he trusted has sold him out, before the echo of a gunshot rings through the lab. 

* * *

PHOENIX MEDICAL

Jack’s sitting on the edge of Mac’s bed, telling him a story about the time he thought he could ride a bull calf in the corral back home, when the room fills with the blaring of warning claxons and strobing red lights.

Mac gasps and curls into himself in instant panic. Riley doesn’t blame him.  _ I’m freaking out, and I can see. _ Full lockdown-level protocols never means anything very good. 

A moment later her comms activate. “Prisoner breach in holding cells.” The automated voice is impassive, and thus terrifying. 

“Riley, what’s going on down there?”

Riley reaches for her rig.  _ It must be Kovacs. _ She pulls up the video feed and glances at it. “Oh God.”

The moment Kovacs was through the doors he brute-forced his way out of his cuffs and started fighting his guards. And then moments after that, James MacGyver’s cell door exploded, and both men left the cell block together.

Riley loses them briefly in the halls, James clearly knows the camera blindspots, but she picks them up again in the stairwell, getting off on the greenhouse/server room floor.  _ I didn’t understand why we had those on the same level until Mac explained they were diverting part of the server heat to keep the separate banks of plants at their own optimal temperatures.  _ She wonders if James was part of the design team for that, too. _ He helped build this building. He knows too much about it. _

“Is that current?” Jack asks.

“Yeah…” Riley trails off as Kovacs takes down the door guards. A moment later, her feed goes dark. “He just did something to our servers. They’re all down.” 

“Do you think you can get them back up again?” Jack asks. 

“I don’t know, I’d have to be in the room,” Riley says. She shakes off the thought of what happened the last time she said that. How close she came to dying. 

-

_ It’s the faintest tap of a footstep behind her. She spins around and fires, just as a second shot echoes in the room. Riley flinches, ears ringing with the combined crack of gunfire. There’s blood spattering her face and chest, but she’s got no way of knowing if it’s hers. Horn collapses in what looks like slow motion. _

_ It was almost a point blank shot. There’s no way he missed at that range. Riley looks down, dropping her gun, hands fumbling for the bullet wound that must be there. There’s blood all over her chest, but she can’t feel the thick gush of it that should be coming from the wound.  _ Where did he hit me? _ There’s nothing.  _ How did he miss, at that distance? _ Jack would call it a miracle. Riley’s inclined to agree. _

-

She’s headed toward the door when a second whooping siren begins to sound, totally different from the lockdown claxon. “What the hell is that?” Jack asks. Diane is bent over, hands over her ears, and Mac is practically vibrating with panic. 

“The building is on fire.” Riley says, then pulls out her phone, glancing at the bright red alert box on the screen. “It’s the labs.”

“Kovac was down there too?”

“I don’t know!” Riley yells. “I have no cameras! That server room had everything in it! Including fire suppression.” 

“And a fire in the labs…” Mac says weakly. “Those could actually explode.”

“There’s manual backup switches for the fire extinguisher system,” Bozer says. “We learned about them when Jill did our mandatory yearly safety seminar.”

“Okay, let’s go find them and get that fire out,” Riley says. “Bozer, you know where it is, right?” He nods. “I’ll cover you. Don’t need you going two for two with getting stabbed in R&D during lockdown.” 

“Technically, I got stabbed in R&D and  _ caused _ the last lockdown,” Bozer says. 

“Jack, stay with Mac, just in case. I’ll go with Riley and Bozer.” Desi draws her gun. Riley shoots a backward glance at Jack and Diane helping Mac out of bed.

They’re halfway down the stairs to R&D when Riley’s comms activate again. It’s Jill, using the built in ‘PA’ system Riley designed, that allows building intercoms to cut into all active agent’s comms whenever a certain code is dialed in. 

“We got to the manual backups and the lab fire is out. But...the labs and apparently the server room are gone. And there’s a body in the lab.”

“Oh god.” Riley says, then grabs her tablet and enables voice return to the intercom from her headset. “Jill, hang tight. Desi and Boze and I are on our way down.”

When they get to the R&D wing doors, Jill is waiting for them, her face sooty and her eyes wide. “It was all of a sudden. We were putting the lab in lockdown mode and then there was smoke everywhere.” She glances through the doors at scorched tile and burned paper. “It didn’t really catch until after we were outside. And I didn’t know the servers were down until Matty sounded the general warning and gave the update.”

Riley nods. 

“I got the fire out as fast as I could, but…when I came back I saw a body on the floor, there.” She points inside. “All my personnel are accounted for,” she adds quickly. “I don’t know who it is.”

“Is it safe to go in?” Riley asks. 

“We need masks, the air’s been flooded with nitrogen and there’s very little oxygen left.” Jill reaches into a wall cabinet and pulls out four masks, with accompanying oxygen bottles. Riley and Desi and Bozer slip theirs on, and so does Jill. The lock on the door is warped and ruined, and Riley’s able to just push it open. 

When they step inside, her eyes instantly tear up from the smoke, and despite the mask, she can smell charred flesh. She feels sick. Desi glances at her, then leans down beside the unmoving body.

“That’s James.” Desi stands up. “The body is pretty badly burned, but the left side of his face is intact enough to confirm…” She looks slightly ill too. 

“Damn.” Bozer sighs. “Jack’s gonna be pissed he didn’t get to shoot him.”

“Well, someone did. He didn’t die from the fire. There’s a bullet hole in his skull,” Desi says. “Guess he made a deal with Kovacs and it went sour on him.”

“Where is Kovacs now?” Bozer asks.

“I don’t know. With cameras out…he probably just walked right out the door with all our evacuees and disappeared.” 

“What's gone?” Desi says, glancing around. “He must have come for something.” 

“Well, inventory of the labs was on the server,” Riley says. “It could take weeks to go through here.” 

“I can tell you one thing that’s missing already.” Jill’s voice is muffled slightly by her breathing mask, but Riley can still hear the panic in it. “He took the Converter.” She points to a cabinet that the locks have been smashed and shot off of. “We had almost half of it in here to run tests.”

“So they didn’t even have to breach cold storage to get it.” Riley feels sick.  _ I knew having it here was a bad move. We should have destroyed it when we had the chance. _ Now it’s in the hands of a madman. 

* * *

When Jack hears Desi confirm that the body is James’s, he’s for the one and only time grateful that Mac can’t see his face. Because none of the emotions on it is grief. There’s fury, that James was working with Kovacs and probably dreamed this whole plan up, maybe even the part that blinded his own son. There’s regret, he genuinely wanted to be the one who looked that bastard in the eye and put him down for good. And there’s relief that James will no longer be able to haunt Mac’s life, pulling strings even from his cell. This time, he’s finished for good. A villain they can cross off the books forever.

“Mac?” Jack says softly. “Mac, they just found James’s body in the lab. He’s dead.”

Mac swallows hard. Twin tears trickle down his cheeks. No matter how much of a monster that man was, Jack thinks that somewhere inside him, Mac was still holding onto some hope, some belief that maybe James would change. And now there’s no chance of that at all.  _ He wasn’t gonna, kid. He made his choices a long time ago.  _ But that’s not what Mac needs to hear right now. 

The last member of Mac’s blood family is dead, and he’s alone. In that respect at least.

“I’m so sorry,” Diane whispers. Jack knows she understands better than he does what it’s like to care about someone who hurt you.  _ I was lucky in the family department. _ Diane held out hope for Elwood for years. Even when all he did was hurt her. “It’s okay, Mac, no one will judge you for however you feel right now.” 

Mac turns into her shoulder and sobs openly. Jack rests his hands on Mac’s shoulders, thumbs rubbing at the sides of his neck.  _ It’s gonna be okay, kid, you got us. _

A dull rumble and the loud whoop of the fire siren starting again makes them all jump and flinch. “What…” Jack pulls out his phone, then grimaces. There’s a multi-level blaze now, the result of some kind of time-delay explosion, apparently. And Matty is ordering a full-staff evacuation now, instead of just nonessential personnel. A moment later, the same news comes over the intercom. 

They’re going to have to evacuate the infirmary, which is technically on an underground sublevel of Phoenix. There’s a rear triage bay that opens directly out, which is where Dr. Grey and her staff are taking the more severely injured patients. But that’s a chaos of beds and people and wires and tubes, and with Mac unable to see, Jack’s pretty sure it will only instill more panic. Jack turns to Mac. “Think you can make it up one set of stairs?”

Mac nods. “I’m blind, not paralyzed.” He bites his lip. “Let’s go.”

Jack and Diane step in, one on each side of him, and head for the stairs. Jack winces at their slow progress.  _ Maybe this was a bad plan. _ Mac fumbles for some of the steps and when his foot slips once, he gasps and shudders. Jack’s glad when they reach the first floor. 

Jack flinches. The door’s hot. They can’t get off on this level. “Mac, bud, I know the stairs aren’t fun but we gotta go further up, okay?” The last thing he heard over his comms was that the fire had already reached the medical bay. They can’t go back.

“He got it…in the vent system,” Mac chokes out. “That’s why it’s going through all the…all the levels.” 

“Remind me to warn Patty that we need to have buffers between each floor when they do repairs, okay?” Jack says, hauling Mac’s arm back over his shoulder and heaving him up the next flight of steps. Diane, beside him, is panting and coughing from the smoke beginning to curl into the stairwell, but she’s not slowing down. 

Still, they’re not going to get out fast enough. The smoke is getting thicker. Jack scoops Mac up in his arms, ignoring the way his shoulder aches in protest, and they take the stairs two at a time until they manage to pop out into the fresh air of the roof. 

The chopper is right where it always is, and Jack helps Mac inside, buckling him up before getting in his own side and putting on his headset. Diane climbs in the back and straps in as well. He fires up the engine then switches the comms live. “Riley?”

“Jack, thank God.” Riley’s voice is hoarse but happy. “Where are you?”

“The roof. Fire pushed us up here.” 

“We’ve got the rest of the building evacuated,” Riley says. “And you and Mom and Mac are the last ones unaccounted for.”

“We’re all here,” Jack says. “And we’ve got the chopper. Can I fly Mac right to a hospital?”

“Yes, there’s a good trauma center about eight minutes away with a helicopter pad on the roof,” Riley says. 

“I’ll call the hospital, tell them you’re coming.” Patty’s voice is tight and sad. “How is he?”

“No different.” Jack glances over at the kid slumped in the passenger seat. “Just hang in there, Mac, we’re gonna get you some help. Okay?”

“I think my eyes  _ are _ getting better,” Mac says, kind of weakly. “Instead of a big dark blur, I see a big light blur.”

“Thanks, Han Solo. Most unfortunately topically relevant Star Wars quote yet.” 

* * *

LOS ANGELES MERCY TRAUMA CENTER

THIS IS OFFICIALLY ONE OF PATTY’S WORST DAYS

They had Tiberius Kovacs in their hands and let him slip away. James MacGyver is dead. And his son is hospitalized, possibly fighting for his life. They still have no idea what toxin got into Mac, and whether it will get better or continue to progress. Since Phoenix got taken down in the middle of running tox screens, they’ve had to start over completely at the hospital.

Patty paces in the hallway. She doesn’t have anything else to do to occupy her time. Fire teams are still getting the blaze at Phoenix under control. Thankfully Riley has encrypted, compressed backups of the most important data from the servers, and the fire in the labs was stopped before it managed to move beyond the desk space and into volatile territory. It’s better than it could have been. But it’s not good. 

Losing the servers is a potentially fatal blow to the agency. James knew what he was doing when he orchestrated his failed breakout. Despite the fact that they have backups of their own data, they’ve lost everything they had from other agencies too. And it’s not likely that they’ll be willing to hand that data over again when the agency requesting it just had a level eight breach. Patty wonders if the Phoenix has what it takes to rise from the ashes one more time. 

If it does, it’ll take every ounce of clout she has, every favor on the table, every IOU she’s ever collected, to make that happen. And before she decides if it’s worth cashing all of that in at once, she has to know what’s going to happen to Mac.

_ If he can’t come back, if this is permanent, or God forbid fatal, there’s no point in resurrecting the Phoenix.  _ Because if Mac doesn’t come back, Jack and Riley and Bozer will quit. Maybe Desi too. Possibly Matty. And without them, the heart of the Phoenix as it is will be gone. 

She jumps when a doctor walks up to her. “Yes?”

“If you’ll come along with me to Mr. MacGyver’s room, the results are in.” 

Patty lied and said she was his aunt. Only family is allowed in. If she had to she could have pulled rank to get her hands on the tests, but it’s easier to say she’s family, and Mac went along with it. 

The doctor looks askance at the group in Mac’s room. Jack and Diane could rather reasonably be parents, but Mac, Riley, and Bozer don’t really resemble siblings, unless the guy assumes there were some adoptions. Or that Riley and Bozer are a couple given the way they’re leaning on each other for support. Even Matty is here.  _ Probably another ‘aunt’. _ Desi is tucked in a corner, munching mechanically on a bag of barbecue chips from the hall vending machine. She probably didn’t even explain herself, just glared until the doctor let her stay. The room is well over its capacity limit, but no one is being asked to leave. 

“Mr. MacGyver?” The doctor asks, and Patty sees Mac flinch. 

“It’s Mac,” She corrects him. He nods.

“Well, Mac, we have your tox screens back, and we’ve managed to identify what’s in your system. There’s good news and bad news. The good news is that the drug is a substance known as 3-Quinuclidinyl Benzilate or BZ. It’s nonfatal in the dosage you received it in. The bad news is that there’s no treatment to counteract it, other than waiting.” He flips the sheet over. “The fever and temporary blindness should begin to clear up in the next few hours, and over the next forty-eight to seventy-two your body will completely flush itself of the drug. We’re going to start you on a regular IV to help your body clear itself out.”

“So my eyes…that’s going to heal?” Mac asks weakly. 

“Yes. The blindness is a side effect of the drug and will wear off along with it. I would advise some caution as your eyes will be sensitive for some time.” The doctor flips the papers back onto his clipboard. “Any more questions?”

“Not right now,” Mac says. The doctor nods and steps out into the hall. 

When a nurse steps in to set up the IV, she’s less forgiving of the crowded room. “Please, everyone, into the hall for a moment,” She says, and even Patty feels like she ought to listen. 

She steps out, leaning agains the wall, and after a moment Jack joins her.

“They did positively ID James’s body, right?” He says. “Wouldn’t put it past him to play some kinda elaborate trick.” She’s sure he’s on edge.  _ After all, Kovacs was supposedly a confirmed kill, and he came back to wreak this havoc. He doesn’t want to take a chance on James. _

“They did,” Patty says. “The body was without a doubt James MacGyver, and he is dead.”

“I wanted to be the one to kill that bastard,” Jack says. “I did.”

“I guess, in a way, you were responsible,” Patty says. “He wanted to kill two birds with one stone. Get his hands on the Converter, and make you pay for stealing his son out from under him, which is why he went to Kovacs. Who managed to double-cross him and kill him.”

“If you were trying to make me feel better, you just did a hell of a job. Cause all that tells me is that I’m the reason my kid is in there suffering.” 

“Jack, stop kicking yourself for this.” Patty says.  _ He always says Mac likes taking the blame for everything, but he’s just the same. _ “You had no way of knowing Kovacs wasn’t dead when you finished that op.”

“But I led him to my family.” Jack stares down at his hands. “This is exactly what I was afraid of. I should have left when I had the chance. Helped hunt him down before he did this to my kid.”

“You don’t know that you would have found him before this. And if all this had happened and you weren’t here, Mac would be devastated. You know that, Jack.” 

“I just can’t stop thinking, I should have gone. I should have gotten to him before all this.” Jack sighs. “If Mac had been blinded for real I never would have forgiven myself.”

“Well, he would have. And he isn’t going to be blind forever. Jack, you can’t change the past. So you have to let it go.” Patty rests a hand on his shoulder. “The only way you can go now is forward.” 

* * *

MAC’S HOUSE

TWO DAYS LATER

“Hey, Mac, easy, it’s okay.” Jack gently maneuvers the kid through the house. “Mickey, hey, you’re not a guide dog, so calm down there, bud.”

Mac chuckles weakly, in spite of how miserable Jack is sure he must be. His sight’s begun to come back, but his eyes are very light-sensitive right now, so they’re still bandaged. Jack’s always been afraid of what might happen if Mac’s brain or his hands are permanently damaged, but now he has a new fear to add to that list. If Mac’s ever blinded for real. It hurts to watch him struggle with the simplest things.

At least his fever is gone. It was agonizing to watch Mac thrash and cry, burning up from the inside out. Jack’s seen a lot of nasty drugs, but he thinks this one ranks up there with the worst of them. Although he’s sure the Converter is worse.  _ We have to find Kovacs and get that back. Clean up our mess.  _ But that can wait, because Mac needs him more.

Patty was right, that day at the hospital. Kovacs might be Jack’s mess, but Mac is Jack’s  _ son. _ And that will always be more important. 

He’s just getting Mac settled in a comfortable chair when the doorbell ring. He jumps up to get it, checking out the window to make sure it’s not someone about to make their day a lot worse. It takes Jack a brief second to recognize the blond with a messy pixie cut standing in the doorway. “Cage?” He asks, pulling open the door. 

“Patty called me, told me what was happening back home.” 

“Sam?” Mac asks, probably hearing and recognizing the Aussie accent. “What are you doing here?”

“I wanted to make sure everyone was alright.”

“You’re a sight for sore eyes,” Mac says, and Jack groans. 

“I didn’t think a side effect of that stuff was bad puns,” He says, helping Mac sit back down on the couch. “But he’s not wrong. It is good to see you again.”

“Won’t be long before I’m back for good,” Sam says. “Got a month of training left and then Eileen’s going to be ready to test for the field.”

“Where is she?”

“Holding down the fort at the Cabin until I fly back tomorrow. I’m sure she’s not going anywhere.” Sam shrugs. “She’s looking forward to getting a second chance with Phoenix.”

“What happened to your hair?” Bozer asks, stepping out from the firepit where he and Diane and Riley have been arguing about what game to play that Mac will be capable of joining in on.

“You know, I always thought  _ Mac  _ was going to be the one who caught my hair on fire. Not Eileen.” Sam chuckles. “It got pretty scorched in a couple places, so I just shaved it. It’s finally starting to grow back.”

“Great, we recruited another firebug, just what we need,” Jack says, jokingly ruffling Mac’s hair. 

The doorbell rings again, and this time Jack sees black hair and tattoos on the other side of the window.  _ Desi with the pizzas. _

He opens the door and lets her in, and when she sets the pizzas on the counter, she turns around and her eyes go wide. 

“Wait, you recruited Desiree Nguyen?” Sam asks, her own face a mostly mastered expression of shock. 

“Yes, they did,” Desi says. “And I still owe you one. So watch your back.”

_ Oh, this is gonna be fun. Spy vs. spy. _ Jack’s looking forward to watching Sam and Desi try to one-up each other all evening. 

They’re just handing around the pizza boxes when Riley’s phone buzzes. She pulls it out and frowns. 

“FRIAR caught Kovacs in Mexico City,” Riley says. “I don’t know what he’s doing down there, but I can’t imagine it’s anything good.”

“Is it actionable?” Jack asks. 

“All it tells us is he’s in the city somewhere.” Riley shrugs. “It’s from the airport. Once he gets out of there, he vanishes again.” 

Desi nods. “I’ll go. You stay with Mac.” She smiles. “After all, I’m the only one who beat your sniper score. So this time I’ll be sure he’s dead.” 

“There’ll be no arguing you out of that, will there?” Jack says. He smiles. “I expect you back home in time for my wedding though, you hear? You can’t just run out on your bridesmaid duties.”

“Dang. And here I was hoping to avoid wearing a pink dress and having to smile for the camera.” But Desi’s grinning. “You got it.” 

“I should probably go with her,” Riley says. Jack sees her fingers fluttering over her concealed sidearm. She’s out for blood too.  _ He hurt her little brother and there will be hell to pay. _ “In case he shows up again I can track him in real time.”

Desi nods. “I appreciate the backup.”

“We’ll get him, Jack,” Riley says. “We’ll find Kovacs and make him pay.”

“I know you will. But…” Jack sighs.  _ I know what it’s like to let obsession with revenge control your life.  _ And he doesn’t want to watch Desi and Riley start on that path. They need to go out there remembering what they’re fighting  _ for. _ Remembering that at the end of the day, what matters is the people they care about. The people they’ll come back home to.  _ If all you’re focused on is making someone pay, then at the end of the day, when it’s over, your sense of purpose is gone. _ He won’t deny that they need to finish this, to make sure Kovacs can’t hurt anyone else. But they also have to be able to come back home and hope for the future. “You got plenty of time to catch a plane in the morning,” Jack says. “For tonight, let’s just be a family.” 

Mac smiles.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Family](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23658322) by [flowing_river](https://archiveofourown.org/users/flowing_river/pseuds/flowing_river)


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